Code better - Code faster - Code smarter

The Java Power Tools Bootcamp is a comprehensive, innovative and hands-on workshop covering best-of-breed open source tools and techniques for Agile Development in Java. Learn how to optimize your development process, hone your programming skills and know-how, and ultimately produce better software. And have fun while you're doing it!

Outline

The course is an intensive 5-day workshop, with a mixture of teaching and lab exercises. You will learn how to implement modern Agile best practices for Java development within your own organisation. Each day starts with a discussion of Agile development practices and covers what tools and techniques you can use to support these practices. The basic course program is outlined here:

Days 1 and 2 - Agile Development Principles and Practices and Maven 2

• Agile Development principles and practices - how to improve your development process in the real world.
• Introduction to Maven 2 - what is it, how can it help you, is it suitable for your project?
• Creating a new project with Maven 2
• The Maven development lifecycle - compiling, testing and building your application
• Dependency management with Maven 2
• Using Maven dependency management in Ant
• Using Maven 2 in Eclipse
• Using plugins to customize the build process
• Setting up a local Maven Repository Manager with Nexus
• Integrating Ant and Maven
• Automating your deployment process with Maven
• Deploying to a web application server
• Automating the release process
• Automated deployments with Cargo
• Using Maven on legacy applications

Day 3 - Unit and Integration testing with JUnit 4, Selenium and easyb

• Principles of Test-driven development
• Writing clearer tests with the Hamcrest assertions
• Using annotations, parameterized tests and JUnit Theories to simplify your tests
• Using test coverage metrics to improve your testing process
• Testing a web interface with Selenium
• Testing your Java applications BDD-style with Groovy and easyb
• Database testing with the easyb DBUnit plugin

Day 4 - Code quality and documentation

• Agile best practices to improve code quality - pair programming, collective code reviews,...
• Enforcing coding standards with Checkstyle
• Enforcing best practices with PMD
• Detecting potential defects with FindBugs
• What is cyclometric complexity and how can it help you write better code?
• Generating useful reports with a Maven site
• Generate UML-based documentation with UMLGraph
• Generate database schemas with SchemaSpy
• Centralized code quality management with Sonar

Day 5 - SCM and Continuous Integration

• Working in iterations and time-boxed releases
• Modern SCM best practices
  • Introduction to Subversion
  • Using Subversion from day to day
  • Using Subversion with Eclipse
  • Branching, merging and tagging
  • Setting up Subversion hooks to customize your repository
  • Using Trac to browse your source code and keep track of issues
  • Integrating Subversion with your issue tracking system
• Automating your build process with Continuous Integration
  • An introduction to Continuous Integration principles
  • Setting up a CI server with Hudson
  • Continuous Integration build strategies and best practices
  • Automated testing
  • Automated code quality audits
  • Automated reporting on project status and statistics
  • Automated deployment
  • Distributed builds

Course Objectives

Students will come away from this workshop with a solid understanding of how they can improve their development practices back in the real world, as well as an abundance of practical tips and tricks that they can use in their day-to-day work. Notably, after the course, students will:

• Use Maven effectively to improve your development productivity and code quality, promote better software architecture, and improve team communication.
• Understand the issues around dependency management in Java development, and be able to implement declarative dependency management in a corporate environment.
• Know how to write effective unit tests, and understand how to use unit testing practices to write more reliable code faster.
• Understand how to use Behaviour-Driven Development to write better designed, more maintainable and more reliable code.
• Be able to write automated database and web interface tests.
• Understand how to use code quality and test coverage metrics to improve your code, and understand what the various metrics can tell you, and also what they can't.
• Have a solid working knowledge of Subversion in the real world, and how to best use it in a Continuous Integration environment.
• Know how to set up a working Continuous Integration server, complete with automated builds, tests, code quality audits and reports, and automatic deployment to an integration server.

Need to convince your boss? Download the course flyer here!

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