Team Development Presentation @ UKOUG
This is an ancient blog post originally published by Brian Duff on 9 October 2003 on Radio Weblogs, and rescued from the Wayback Machine.
On Tuesday, I went along to Oracle’s London City office to present for the Modeling and Development SIG of the UK Oracle User Group. It was a pretty nice experience (developers don’t get out much :) ), and it was great to meet customers solving real problems with our software… For some reason, my daily work of developing tools to help people develop stuff always seems one level removed from reality.
One of the aims of the presentation was to encourage some of the SIG members to come along and present about their experiences with Oracle software. Mostly, Oracle are represented at these things by product managers, and the idea this time was to have a couple of developers along as well to do presentations from more of a “this is how we did something” perspective.
My presentation was a little bit about team development from a theoretical perspective, but mostly concentrated on the practical aspects of development in the large multi-site JDeveloper team. It talks a bit about how we use version control internally, the way our code is organized, some of our team-related development practices and infrastructure (e.g. our automated build system).
Modern notes from future Brian:
Around this time in my career, I was doing more public speaking (mainly at events like this and the yearly JavaOne conference), which is something that always used to terrify me. I remember feeling quite physically ill before doing this particular presentation, in part because I’d completely rewritten it at the last minute based on feedback from one of Oracle’s product managers.
The product manager’s advice was good, but I think I should have stuck a bit more to my original goals, because the presentation doesn’t really do the “Best Practices” part justice, and is more of an inventory of what we did on the JDeveloper team.
Looking at the slides, it’s interesting how much this foreshadowed side work that I did after moving to the US with Oracle. The development process, notwithstanding the rosy picture in these slides, actually had some severe awfulness, particularly around the build system and version control. I led a couple of side projects to write a new modular build system and created a builds dashboard that was still in use even up to a few years ago to make some of these things better.
The best practices in this deck seem really, really obvious nowadays. It’s possible that they always were. One of the slightly excruciating things about reading old blogs is how utterly obvious all things seem in hindsight :) It almost feels like it was unnecessary to write these things down, because they’re so evidently true. It didn’t feel that way at the time though, I think.
