Maven

I've never had a good chance to look at maven, but just today I've for the first time generated the "project(code) management" layout through maven. I'm very impressed at its capabilities and dependency management and intend to use it for any project following up. It's just too good really and there's not much sense to keep hacking ant files in order to manage the project.

As an intro to maven... It's a great tool to start out a new project and manage the project configuration, build, dependencies, tests, releases and sites with. It does a lot of stuff out of the box in a standard way and you could more or less say that it's a 3rd-4th generation "make" tool. Where with any you still had to "program" tasks, with ant you can just configure pre-defined tasks that generally run in a consistent way (since every project needs it) and be done with it. Having a consistent layout also means that you don't need those ${src} and ${build} variables any longer.

It has the ability to produce manifests for jars, version/build numbers and can automatically deploy to locations you register. There is inheritance between configuration files, so that you can set up a chain of configuration files for your development "street" as you call it. And due to the registration and management of library repositories, your dependencies are automatically tracked and updated whenever the project thinks it needs them. No more looking for lib files and downloading them, it does it for you.

For Project Dune, there's an effort starting where we'll document software engineering in a very straightforward way. Rather than calling it a "methodology" like Scrum, XP, RUP and whatever, the idea is that we just focus on the activities that must happen anyway regardless of the approaches used to fulfill those activities.

Then the idea is that besides the activities, you might need the output of one activity as input to another or trace back information back to the source. You could imagine a certain "thread of information" running through a development life-cycle.

Every sw project has such a cycle, but not everybody commits to executing all the required activities to guarantee quality. For example, I imagine that RUP adopters execute a lot of activities, but not every activity necessarily adds value. And people working solo on a project may never do active reviews.

The idea is that the process doesn't become the holy grail of an organization (the administrative efforts), but the activities that are part of engineering. I don't have a full view yet how this is going to work out, but the site on project dune will be modeled after that vision. It's not very likely to get the same size as a process-driven description, but a minimal site where activities are clear and what they contribute to a project is already a very good start.