Estimating is regarded as little little more than 'educating guessing', but so much can hang on the quality of those estimates. With good estimates we can set clear expectations for project delivery, but with bad estimates we can run over schedule and over budget, or worse. We often estimate when we know the least about the work that needs to get done - so how can we make the best of what is potentially a bad situation?

In this session we will look at how successful agile teams estimate the scope of work at the beginning of a project, estimate the amount of work that fits into any one iteration, track the work through the iteration, and the 'burn down' through the end of the project. We will look at 'low ceremony' estimation techniques like planning poker, trim down 'high ceremony' techniques like Wideband Delphi, and look at "FET+", an estimation technique originally developed as a foil for a CMMi effort.

With a little effort, a little planning, a little tracking, open communication, and some good metrics, estimation does not have to be a 'crystal ball' activity.

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a big ball of code you have to plod through to try to get anything done? Have you ever been the 'new guy' on a project where it seems like the code grew more like weeds and brambles than a well-tended garden? With a few good tools to help analyze the code, we can keep our project from turning into that big ball of mud, and we can salvage a project that is already headed down that path.

In this talk we will look at PMD, FindBugs, Macker, JDepend, and several other tools that can help us analyze source code and find problems we need to fix. We will cover each tool in enough depth for you to know what it does and how it can help you, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and see how it would fit in your personal development processes.

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How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a build process that mysteriously fails, a bunch of 'TODO' and 'FIXME' comments in the source, and problems that come and go because "it works on my machine"? Does your project have a little bit of 'folk wisdom' that isn't well-known, but is necessary to get things done? How easily could you recreate your development environment if you got a new machine today?

In this session we will talk about some tried and true favorites like Ant, Maven, Subversion, and Eclipse, cover tools like diff, patch, difftools, and diffj for teasing apart changesets, and talk about measuring and managing complexity with tools like cobertura, JavaNCSS, XRadar, CodeStriker, and Jupiter. We will cover each tool in enough depth for you to know what it does and how it can help you and your team, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and see how it would fit in your team's development processes.