Take Control of Your Dependencies

About This Webcast:

Dependencies are perhaps the biggest potential source of problems for build teams. The improper handling of dependencies cause build failures, impede build speed improvement efforts and can create administrative headaches for the build team.  In these situations, the build team is often left between a rock and a hard place: responsible for delivering builds under conditions that are beyond their ability to describe let alone manage.

In extreme cases new development can grind to a halt as releases become increasingly difficult to get out. Yet even in normal situations opportunities exist for significant improvements in build quality and development productivity by addressing how the organization handles dependencies.

Existing dependency analysis techniques, while valuable as a tool for the development organization, don't map well to the concerns of the build operation. For the build team, dependency optimization means balancing reusability and testability with release-ability and deploy-ability.

Created with the build team in mind, this presentation focuses on developing a deeper understanding of dependencies in software systems and specifically on the dependencies between deployable components. We will investigate how the understanding and management of these dependencies provides a mechanism for building, packaging and deploying software in faster and more agile ways.

The speakers will share their thoughts and experiences on ways the build team can better characterize and communicate build-specific dependency issues. Using these tools, the build team can begin to influence development decision making, increasing organizational performance and agility.

Tom Schultz, Chief Technical Officer, Codefast Inc.
Tom is responsible for technical product direction and product management at Codefast. Tom comes to Codefast from Rational (Now IBM), where he was the director of product strategy, focused on putting together the company's overall technology roadmap. Prior to that, Tom directed the engineering effort and technical product direction for the award-winning Rational Rose Visual Modeling product. He is also one of the contributors to the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

Prior to his 12 year tenure at Rational, Tom was one of the founding members of the General Electric Advanced Concepts Center where he helped bring the OMT (one of the predecessors of UML) method and tools to market.

Kirk Knoernschild, Chief Technology Strategist, QWANtify, Inc
Kirk is the Chief Technology Strategist at QWANtify, Inc., where he leads based on his firm belief in the pragmatic use of technology. In addition to his work on enterprise development projects, Kirk shares his experiences through courseware development and teaching, writing, and speaking at seminars and conferences. Kirk has provided training and mentoring to thousands of software professionals, teaching courses on object-oriented development, Java, software architecture, software process, and UML.

Kirk is the author of Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, and the founder of www.extensiblejava.com, a growing resource of design pattern heuristics that emphasize greater component modularity in large scale enterprise software projects. He is also the creator of JarAnalyzer, a utility for identifying and managing the physical dependencies between .jar files. His personal website is www.kirkk.com.