We have a special guest speaker for this coming Tuesday's March Java Meetup: Bjorn Freeman-Benson, formerly CTO of Eclipse and now VP Development of NewRelic. A special thanks to Mitch Sonies for arranging this!

Agile All The Way Down

You are an agile Java developer and you work in an agile shop, but are you agile all the way through deployment and production? You are using a full complement of profiling, testing and load generation tools for your Java app, but we all know that even with the most rigorous pre-deployment QA, "issues" will sneak through. To catch these, all serious apps use production monitoring of one kind or another. The ah-ha moment comes when we realize that we can use that same production monitoring to increase our agility: we can shorten the pre-production testing cycles and push new iterations into production with minimal testing. I'll talk about how we've done this, and how our customers have done this, and how other great engineering projects in history have done this. With real life examples and stories of how we've become more agile, I hope to enthuse you to become "agile all the way down".

Bjorn Freeman-Benson
After five years at the Eclipse Foundation working with committer community, Bjorn Freeman-Benson is now part of the engineering team at New Relic. A software language aficionado with experience in open source, closed source, big companies and small companies (Eclipse/Java, Amazon/Perl, Rational/C#, Gemstone/Smalltalk, OTI/Smalltalk, ...), he has a variety of war stories, many of them interesting. He has an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and is happy to talk at length about his passion for orienteering and/or his love of flying and electric cars.

Door prizes (courtesy of Sun), and refreshments courtesy of Yodle: http://yodle.com...

PLEASE include full name with RSVP (and of guests) due to building security and if you change plans please update!