Date: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 (2nd Tuesday)
Time: 6:30pm
Location: 3M Auditorium at Owens Science Hall
Topic: Practical Tools and Techniques for Improving Development
Productivity
presented by Tom Wadzinski

Abstract
Practical Tools and Techniques for Improving Development Productivity
Software professionals often balance their time between interacting
with business people, performing technical design, and coding,
testing and debugging. If insufficient time is available for these
activities due to factors such as tight deadlines and changing
requirements, software quality will suffer, and projects may fail.
Increasing the number of developers on a project to meet a tight
deadline many argue is actually likely to have a negative effect on
overall project success.

Successful projects employing Agile principles reveal that individual
and process efficiency is essential to success, through face-to-face
communication, lightweight design tools, etc. In that same vein, if
developers can code, test and debug more efficiently without
compromising quality, they are more valuable and project success is
more likely.

The presenter will show how such development efficiency can be
achieved through optimizing repetitive tasks. The presentation will
provide a hands-on look at a variety of techniques. Examples of
techniques and tools to be shown are:


Time-saving IDE conveniences/plugins (most applicable to both Eclipse
and IntelliJ IDEA)
Ant build script optimizations
Firefox Developer plugins - Selenium IDE, Live HTTP Headers, "Web
Developer"
Runtime Control of Application Logging for troubleshooting
Weblogic-specific deployment time reduction techniques

About The Speaker
Tom Wadzinski is a Senior Software Consultant at Object Partners,
Inc., in Minneapolis. A recent returnee to the Midwest, Tom worked at
software startup companies in Boston for the last several years. Tom
is an Agile methodologies enthusiast and has been developing
primarily on JEE.