Neal Ford, May 19, 2008

Code Metrics & Analysis for Agile Projects

What does code + methodology have to do with one another? Everything! Agile projects focus on delivering working code, and tools exist to allow you to verify some quality metrics for your code. This session is a survey of tools and metrics that allow you to determine the quality of your code and strategies to "wire it" into your agile project.

Agile projects focus on delivering code. The responsibility for the quality of that code lies with developers. Yet most developers have a poor sense of how to gauge the quality of code, both during development and forensically. This talk lives on the boundary between what is important in agile projects and ways to verify code quality. It is both a survey of tools and metrics and strategies for proactively applying these techniques to ongoing projects. I talk about the Hawthorne effect, analysis tools (both byte and source code), useful metrics, tools for generating metrics, and how to analyze raw data into actionable tasks.

Session Topics:

• The Hawthorne Effect
• How Agility and Metrics Feed Each Other
• Analysis Tools: FindBugs and PMD/CPD
• Testing Metrics
• Cyclomatic Complexity
• Chidamber and Kemerer Object-oriented Metrics
• JDepend
• Code Change Risk Analyzer and Predictor for Java
• Panopticode
• Tools

As always, our monthly meetings are free to attend and open to local software professionals, students and faculty. Feel free to pass this announcement along to your colleagues.

Speaker

Neal Ford is an Application Architect for ThoughtWorks. He is an architect, designer, and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video/DVD presentations. Neal is also the author of Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques (Prentice Hall PTR, 1996), JBuilder 3 Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 1999), and Art of Java Web Development (Manning, 2003). His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Object Pascal, C++, and C. Neal's primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 30 developer conferences worldwide.

Sponsor

The May 2008 meeting sponsors are:

The No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium Series is designed to cover the latest in trends, best practices, and newest developments in Enterprise Java, Java/Groovy, ESB/SOA, Ajax, Web Services, Agility, and Architecture. Our commitment is to provide the very best in terms of speaker quality and overall conference experience. Their upcoming Agile IT! Experience (Agile ITX) event will take place June 26 - 28, 2008 in Reston, Virginia. The central theme of Agile ITX is to help your team consistently deliver better software. We'll focus on the entire software development life cycle, from requirements management to test automation to software process. You'll learn how to Develop in Iterations, Collaborate with Customers, and Respond to Change. Software is a difficult field with high rates of failure. Our world-class speakers will help you implement best practices, deal with persistent problems, and recognize opportunities to improve your existing practices.

Our on campus sponsor is The Games Club, a tri-institutional (MSCD, UCD, and CCD) club that seeks to unite the campus and provide a closer-knit college community to Auraria Campus. The Funds raised by the games club through sponsorship of events like Agile Denver is used to help fund scholarships to club members and to encourage participation in the Homeward Bound project.

Location

The meeting will be held in the Tivoli Student Union (TV) building, in Room 261 (Multicultural Lounge).

The Tivoli is located on the Auraria Campus, within walking distance of Downtown Denver via Larimer Street crossing Speer. You can reach the campus from the I-25 south Colfax or Speer exits.

Please review or print out the parking map for reference.

Parking on site costs $5 to attendees of our event and there should be parking available in the lots off of Auraria Parkway and Ninth Street. Be sure to mention that you are attending an on campus event otherwise they might assume you are there for a sports event.