I attended QCon San Francisco conference last week. The conference schedule included tutorial sessions before the main conference. There were several tutorials on topics like:

• SpringSource dm Server by Rob Harrop
• Domain Specific Languages by Neal Ford, Martin Fowler & Rebecca Parsons
• Scala (Bill Venners)
• Erlang (Francesco Cesarini)
• JRuby and JRuby on Rails (Ola Bini & Nick Sieger), and
• Agile Management (David Anderson).

I attended Certified Scrum Master (CSM) hosted by Martine Devos from Object Mentor Project Management team. Martine is an excellent CSM Trainer. The tutorial class was very educational and informative for people who are in technical management to be come Agile Project Managers. The class was interactive that allowed students to discuss with each other and rest of the group in serveral real-world project management scenarios.

Some of my favorite parts of the class are:

• Scrum From Hell
• Estimation Quiz

Martine is a great instructor. I recommend her class for any one who wants to learn how to be an Agile Project Manager.

On day 2 of the conference, I attended an ad hoc presentation by Ralph Johnson (one of GOF Design Patterns authros) on Parallel Computing Design Patterns.

The second QCon San Francisco (QCon SF 2008) conference is fast approaching us. The conference is held at Westin SF Market Street from November 19 - 21.



The schedule includes tracks on Domain Driven Design (DDD), Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), REST Web Services, Design and Architecture (with several case-studies presentations), Emerging Technologies, and Agile Methodologies.

I was at the conference last year. It was a great experience. I am looking forward this year's conference. With several interesting sessions, most of them conflicting with each other, it will be tough to pick which session to attend.

Domain Driven Design (DDD) is about mapping business domain concepts into software artifacts. Most of the writings and articles on this topic have been based on Eric Evans' book "Domain Driven Design", covering the domain modeling and design aspects mainly from a conceptual and design stand-point.

I recently wrote an article on Infoq to cover the domain modeling and design from a practical stand-point on how one would go about taking a domain model and actually implementing it. It looks at the guidelines, best practices frameworks and tools that technical leads and architects can use in the implementation effort.

By now, we have all heard about Agile software development methodology and its different flavors such as SCRUM, XP, DSDM etc etc.

I have been part of development teams using SCRUM methodology for last year and a half and I am learning more about agile concepts in every project using these techniques. The more I think about a project that is managed using SCRUM, I can't help but think about how similar this approach is to the way a football (American Football, not Soccer) game is played. Let me explain, here are the different aspects of both Scrum and Football that are very similar in nature.

• The "First Down" in a football game is same as a "Sprint" in a Scrum project, Sprint = First Down.

• In other words, End of Sprint = First down (10 yards is the objective for every down in football; End of Sprint/Iteration is the objective in Scrum)

• End of Project (which usually consists of several Sprints) = Touchdown
  

How about the various meetings held in a typical SCRUM project? How do they relate to football terms?

• Project Kickoff Meeting = Game Kickoff
• Daily stand-ups = Huddle
• Start of Iteration/Product Backlog = Line Of Scrimmage
• Iteration Planning Meetings (IPM) - Pre-game meeting
• Retrospective = Post Game Conference

Let's look at the SCRUM team member roles and how they are similar to a football team member roles.

• Scrum Master = Head Coach
• Technical Lead = Running back
• Architect = Quarter back

Some of the other roles and artifacts that I haven't yet found a match are as follows:

• Stakeholders
• Developers
• QA Testers = Referees?
• Burn-down chart

Apache ActiveMQ Version 5.1 release is out. It has some interesting new features for destination monitoring (via JMX), priority message ordering and a Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) to ActiveMQ Bridge with the new msmq transport component. Check out this news item on InfoQ about all the features supported by AMQ 5.1 release.