QCon Tokyo was held at Tokyo conference center, Japan on April 9-10, 2009.

I have attended several sessions and found some common trend. That is, "Simple is best".

In Martin Fowler's keynote speech, he presented Domain Specific Language (DSL). He highlighted readability of code, as role of DSL. It helps business people to understand an application.

Also, Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring, in "Spring in a Changing World" stated the failure of old J2EE at first. According to Johnson, J2EE failed because of its complexity. Now developers want simple solutions. and He concluded that "enterprise Java must get simpler".

Junzo Hagimoto, a Requirement Development Methodologist, described about how to bring business values into system development. There are misunderstanding and conflict between customers and developers. He recommended to show the whole picture to both and have strategy for generating business value. He said that he was seeking to think and do everything simply.

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, also introduced Paul Graham's word, "succinctness is power", in his keynote speech "Beautiful Code". He states that code is beautiful and simplicity is also beautiful.

As a developer, I belive that seeking simplicity will improve the quality of code and the working environment of developers. Since new technologies are constantly generated and the world becomes increasingly complex, the simplicity will be one of the key factors for success.

Martin Fowler made a keynote speech at QCon Tokyo on April 9, 2009. He presented an introduction of Domain Specific Language (DSL).

As an example, he showed us a statemachine diagram, a class diagram and Java code. It is not a difficult code, but maybe we can not understand it at a glance. At least, we have to read the code to understand.

However, it's more readable if you use DSL.

He presented several examples such as XML, CSS, regular expressions, Ruby on Rails and DSL.

Since these languages have meaning in themselves, they are more readable than other programming languages like Java.

We can not develop an application by using regular expressions only, but it's easy to understand when we use it as a part in our coding.

DSL also helps business people to understand the application and communicate with programmers. It increases programmer's productivity, too.

He says code generation of DSL is "optional". It is sometimes useful and essential, but still optional. He seems that he emphasizes readability of DSL over code generation.

In conclusion, he said this speech was an introduction of DSL and we would be able to find more articles in his website. He added he would write about DSL in the future (when he has time!).
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/

Hello all,
We have released JUDE/professional, Community 5.5 Beta! I would like to show you whats new in 5.5 beta briefly.

JUDE/Professional 5.5 Beta

- The biggest implement in JUDE/professional in 5.5 Beta would be C++ Support!

- Setting C++ language information to project
- Type Modifier (such as *, & information) support
- C++ Primitive Type Support
- C++ Language support for Classes, Attributes and Operations
- Export C++ Source code
Please read JUDE/C ++ topic for more info.

- Font color setting

Finally you can color texts! Font color setting is available for each object name. So you can color text of important objects to make them look stand out or for any purposes.



- J2SE 5.0, 6.0 tools.jar support for Export HTML
Finally JRE 5, 6 tools.jar is supported for HTML export, and the tools.jar of J2SE1.4 is no longer available since ver 5.5b1.


- Compare diagrams graphically


Now you can compare two different diagrams graphically, this new feature shows two diagrams side by side and points whats different on the diagram with colored square. It makes it easy to understand the difference between two diagrams visually.



- Export image of UseCase Descriptions and CRUDs
- Improvements on StateMachins Diagram, Export Entity Definitions, API...and much more

Please see the rest in the Release Note.

Try out JUDE/Professional 5.5 Beta, looking forward to your feedback!

Cheers,
Satomi

Thanks to many requests from JUDE users worldwide, we have added UML2.0 support in JUDE/Community 5.4.

Now you can draw Composite Structure Diagrams in JUDE/Community5.4 :










And, you can draw Sequence Diagrams by using Combined Fragments, Interaction Use and State Invariant, and so on :










Other UML2.0 elements have been added. The detailed information of UML 2.0 in JUDE is available at :
http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/product/features.html#uml2

Download JUDE/Community5.4 :
https://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/serviceDownloadLink.do

You may also check the new functions in JUDE/Professional 5.4 :
https://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/product/professional.html

Thanks to SEA Tecnologia in Brazil, the Portuguese translation of JUDE/Community 5.3 is newly added in JUDE website.

Let's enjoy using the Portuguese version of JUDE/Community.

1) Download and install JUDE/Community 5.3.

2) Download and set the Portuguese resource file into JUDE.

Please see details in JUDE GUI Localization

JUDE API Forum has been opened. This forum is aimed to share JUDE API programs among JUDE users.

The following programs are available in the forum:
- DB Reverse
- CSV Export
- Class/ER Diagrams Export
- State Transition Table

Also, C# reverse program will be released in the next version of JUDE.

JUDE API enables you to reference, create and edit JUDE models. (Create and edit functions are supported in JUDE/Professional only.) Let's have a look at JUDE API samples.
Your application using JUDE API will be welcomed, too.

The biggest event for me was the banquet party.

I got 2008 Gordon Pask Award for contribution to Agile community. And I led a group of Japanese to sing the song Dear XP!

Thank you very much!

Kanban is another emerging topic, I'm catching up with. I met David, Corey, Aaron, and Karl -- "Kanban All Stars" at the conference!



This is a photo from workshop led by Karl and Aaron.

Corey summirized all the Kanban related sessions in his blog.

I think there are two ways to scale out Agile. One is "Tree" type, or Scrum of Scrums type. In this model, strong synchronization of the teams is needed. The other is "River" type, or lean type, where multiple teams work asynchronously using buffers inbetween. In this "river" type, even the concept of iteration is not necessary. (There is other reasons for iterations, but logically no need)

Kanban works very well in relatively a stable development, like maintainance phase of products, where team structure or state transition of work items is identified and stable.

Here is my observation of Kanban 9 features. Kanban is a balancing tool between continuous flow and reducing WIP. AND, is a visualization tool for Kaizen or process improvement. My infoQ article related to this topic is here.

Agile UX(User Experience) was the most emergeing and creative edge at Agile2008.

Alan Cooper's keynote was about UX, recongizing Agile as the first development approach that makes UX design work.

And here are some photos which UX stage people including Peter Roessler, salesforce were doing -- Graffiti Wall. I'm familiar to these walls but, this is awesome. Colored sticky notes are prepared in a box with a colored instruction tents.

And post cards. Visual icons or avatars are now very popular for giving more recognizable identity in SNS-like services. They use post cards as icons, and post it onto the sessoin board. One post card per session! At the back of the cards, time schedule and place are beautifully printed in a consistent format.(I forgot to take photos)

 

I led session at Agile2008, "Learning Kaizen from Toyota". Conflicts during organizational transition occuring in factories which adopt TPS has a lot in common with ones which adopt Agile. In this session, I showed them a video of factory reconstruction, and discussed the commonalities we found.