Three speakers this time, and all good! I’m going to keep two of the summaries short, because the last one was by far the most interesting.
Understanding adaptive runtimes
Two presenters from JRockit explained what a runtime is, and that they have written a book about JRockit. I’m most likely going to buy it soon. The book is supposed to cover not only JRockit, but some more general topics in the field of Java and runtimes.
Now, I’ve been to a couple of JRockit presentations throughout the years, so I’m sort of keeping up at high level with what they’re doing. In this presentation they didn’t talk about their deterministic GC, but about the monitoring capabilities and requirements on runtimes. Cool technology, knowledgable presenters, but not a very new topic.
Introduktion to Terrastore
Two commiters from the Terrastore project gave an overview of what Terrastore actually was. Now, running the risk of having mistunderstood something, it goes like this:
Terrastore uses Terracotta to provide clustering for a document-based database. JSON-structured documents are stored in a distributed environment and can be queried using XPath and XQuery.
Personally, I haven’t figured out what these databases are good for yet, having only experience from first normal form heavily indexed NoSQL databases, but it will come to me I’m sure.
The Professor and the Entrepreneur
This presentation was given by Mary Poppendieck! How cool is that? Having her here in Sweden. It was very informative, and again there’s the risk of mistunderstanding, but this is as I have perceived it:
In order to succeed with product development (of any kind), two types of roles are required: A Product Champion and a Competency Leader. The Product Champion is both a marketing lead and a technical lead, while the Competency leader in conjunction with small unit management skills forms the Line Manager role. At the roughest level, the Product Champion knows what to do and the Competency Leader knows how to do it. The Product Champion assembles a business team that makes sure that the product succeeds and the Competency Leader is an expert in a critical technical field. There was more to it, but the central take away was the concept of Product Champion and Line Manager.
This setup has some consequences. For example, product architecture is the domain of the Product Champion, and Mary was clear when saying that she wouldn’t bet her money on an evolving architecture, if the product were to have a long life span. Another interesting consequence was that Scrum Masters were classified as process leaders, and were not needed according to this division of labour/responsibility (in the long run). Their responsibilities already fit in the Line Manager role.
While not being a central point, I reacted to that she said that where she worked, her manager could always do her job. That’s quite an intriguing thought!
This summary doesn’t give the presentation justice, but it does include my take aways.