Speakers


John Smart

Author of Java Power Tools

John Smart

John is an experienced consultant and trainer specialising in Enterprise Java, Web Development, and Open Source technologies, currently based in Wellington, New Zealand. Well known in the Java community for his many published articles, and as author of Java Power Tools, John helps organisations around the world to optimize their Java development processes and infrastructures and provides training and mentoring in open source technologies, SDLC tools, and agile development processes.



Blog

Faster Web Tests with Parallel Batches in Thucydides

Posted Saturday, December 24, 2011

Web tests are as a rule much slower than other types of tests, but they can be sped up significantly by running them in parallel. However, this is often harder to implement than it sounds. The latest version of Thucydides (version more »

Some useful new Hamcrest matchers for collections

Posted Sunday, December 11, 2011

Hamcrest is a neat little library that lets you write more fluent and readable tests. For example, rather than writing: assertEquals("red", color); you would write: assertThat(color,is("red")); This makes for tests that express their intent muchmore »

Code Coverage as a refactoring tool

Posted Sunday, May 15, 2011

Using code coverage to help with refactoring, when combined with TDD, is a powerful tool. This article discusses how. I am a big fan of using code coverage as a developer tool to promote more reliable, better tested codmore »

Integration Test Driven Development - the Vietnam of TDD

Posted Monday, May 9, 2011

Sometimes, even if you are generally applying good Test Driven Development practices, you can find yourself slipping into what I call Integration-Test Driven Development, or ITDD. Essentially, this is when you use a high level integration or functional more »

Code coverage metrics and Functional Test Coverage

Posted Tuesday, May 3, 2011

There have been some articles and tweets about code coverage recently, and it seems that many developers are still laboring under a few misconceptions in this area. Code coverage can be a very useful metric. However you need to know how, and whenmore »

Build Pipelines with Jenkins/Hudson

Posted Monday, March 7, 2011

This article is an extract from the upcoming book Jenkins: The Definitive Guide, to be published in the coming months with O'Reilly.. One of the more interesting plugins to emerge over the last few months is the Build Pipeline plugin, written by thmore »
Read More Blog Entries »

Presentations

Automated deployment with Maven and friends - going the whole nine yards

Automating your build process with Continuous Integration is certainly a great idea, but why stop there? Why not go the whole nine yards and automate the deployment process as well? Staging and production deployments are typically more complicated and mormore »

Zen and the Art of Build Script Maintenance

Build scripts are an essential art in any software project. And yet they are so often fragile, brittle and unportable things, hard to understand and harder to maintain. In this talk, we cover what constitutes a good build script, and look at a few of the more »

Coding Dojo with John Smart

A Coding Dojo is a place where programmers come to improve their skills, by following a pattern similar to the martial arts dojo. Participants meet for at a pre-arranged time in a room that has one computer attached to a screen. The aim of the exercise wimore »

Continuous Integration - Hudson

Continuous Integration is a fundamental best practice of modern software development. In this workshop, you will learn how to set up an effective Continuous Integration environment using Hudson, a popular open source Continuous Integration tool. more »

JUnit Kung Fu: Getting More Out of Your Unit Tests

JUnit is the de facto standard in Java testing. Yet many advanced JUnit features are little known and poorly understood. This session reviews some lesser-known features of JUnit, along with a few associated libraries, that can make your unit tests more pomore »

Completing the circle - Automated web tests as a team communication tool

Acceptance Test Driven Development, or ATDD, has proven to be a very effective technique, both for driving and guiding development, and for enhancing communication between developers and other project stakeholders. But why stop there? Well designed Acceptmore »

Books

Java Power Tools
by John Ferguson Smart

Java Power Tools Buy from Amazon
List Price: $59.99
Price: $37.40
You Save: $22.59 (38%)

  • All true craftsmen need the best tools to do their finest work, and programmers are no different. Java Power Tools delivers 30 open source tools designed to improve the development practices of Java developers in any size team or organization. Each chapter includes a series of short articles about one particular tool -- whether it's for build systems, version control, or other aspects of the development process -- giving you the equivalent of 30 short reference books in one package.

    No matter which development method your team chooses, whether it's Agile, RUP, XP, SCRUM, or one of many others available, Java Power Tools provides practical techniques and tools to help you optimize the process. The book discusses key Java development problem areas and best practices, and focuses on open source tools that can help increase productivity in each area of the development cycle, including:

    • Build tools including Ant and Maven 2
    • Version control tools such as CVS and Subversion, the two most prominent open source tools
    • Quality metrics tools that measure different aspects of code quality, including CheckStyle, PMD, FindBugs and Jupiter
    • Technical documentation tools that can help you generate good technical documentation without spending too much effort writing and maintaining it
    • Unit Testing tools including JUnit 4, TestNG, and the open source coverage tool Cobertura
    • Integration, Load and Performance Testing to integrate performance tests into unit tests, load-test your application, and automatically test web services, Swing interfaces and web interfaces
    • Issue management tools including Bugzilla and Trac
    • Continuous Integration tools such as Continuum, Cruise Control, LuntBuild and Hudson
    If you are a Java developer, these tools can help improve your development practices, and make your life easier in the process. Lead developers, software architects and people interested in the wider picture will be able to gather from these pages some useful ideas about improving your project infrastructure and best practices.