Medieval Programming

Codecentric coding night is an event run by codecentric employees in their free time, to prove agile methods, try new technologies, and have some fun on the weekend. This coding night will us all of Spring to create a time tracking and invoicing tool. Event is running from Friday 10th of July 2009 2PM to Sunday 12th of July 2PM

• 14:00 – 15:00 Product owner presents product vision. 4 Scrum teams are set up. I was volunteered as Scrum master of team 4
• 15:30 – 16:30 Busy Iteration 0 – Teams 1&2 have planning, Teams 3&4 set up subversion, a wiki, eclipse dev-env & instructions, hudson build, basic guidelines.
• 16:30 – 17:30 Planning got delayed because Team 2 still occupies our product owner. Written some sample persistence files. Installed some tooling
• 17:30 – 19:00 Great Planning session. We are doing CRUD for Users and Teams, and implementing some permission management.
• 19:00 – 19:15 BBQ
• 19:15 – 19:45 Scrum of Scrums, discussed Modeling issues, and technology selections. Went pretty straightforward. Tried to keep it simple
• 19:45 – 22:00 First real iteration for my team.
• 22:00 – 22:05 Standup – Good prgress, many conflicts with others as everybody currently fixing same stuff. In total great progess.
• 22:15 Database unit tests executing, automatically deployed Testversion on CI system
• 22:05 – 24:00 Many people left, but a few hardcore remained. had stability issues with our deployment version, some refactoring services, others on the controller. I tweacked CI system to generate more reports.
• 00:00 – 00:20 Scrum of Scrums again. Discussed Transaction and stability issues.
• 00:20 – 03:00 general refactoring session because just a few people left. simplified code introduced more conventions.
• 05:00 almost killed the SVN by override and commit.  Was able to fix it
• 03:00 – 05:30 few last men standing hacking stuff on their boxes. I wouldnt call this structured project work anymore, but its fun. Need a coffee…
• 05:30 Spring security working for the application
• 05:30 – 06:30 Decided to put sitemesh into the application, will make devs smile
• 06:30 – 08:30 Had a short nap zzzZZZZzzzz
• 08:30 – 9:30 OutofCoffeeException. Slowly getting up pace again. First colleagues coming back again.
• 09:30 – 12:00 Busy coding. I try to setup Spring Security with our own data model. That in memory database makes headaches.
• 12:00 – 14:00 My brother Christian arrived. I showed him our place and why we work on the weekend.
• 14:00 – 15:00 First Iteration Demo. All teams presented something but still struggle.
• 15:00 – 16:00 Finally integrated the login into our data model. I don’t really like the solution
• 16:00 – 16:30 Scrum of Scrums. Discussion about creating test data and error handling
• 16:30 – 18:00 Fabian out for a shower at home
• 18:00 – 19:00 Created a database setup script that wipes all data and then rebuilds some objects
• 19:00 – 20:00 Making more sample data
• 20:00 – 22:00 Remaining codecenricer gathered in our courtroom. Hacking session begins. Currently assessing state of everything and identifying actions.
• 22:00 – 01:00 Testcases creation. Spring is quite easy to test.
• 01:00 – 10:00 Fabian is out for a sleep. Getting too old for 2 days without.
• 10:00 – 14:00 Final round. tasks boards are getting cleared. But no big bugfixing
• 14:00 – 15:00 Final presentation, discussions retrospective.

Coding night is over. We had a lot of fun, learned a lot and produced software. And we have eaten tons of barbecue

During the last year I was involved in creating the infrastructure for calculating insurances. It involved integrating a neat interface into a Content Management System, creating a simple data model for data kept on CMS side, connecting the CMS over a WebService to a generic integration system that is able to calculate a variety of plans based on the same input data. I also worked on that integration system, which contains a generic insurance data model (similar to the GDV or BiPRO ones, where we aim to get compliant with), a business process engine, which allows to do more than just calculation (for example cross selling) and an Enterprise Service Bus to connect with internal and external parties over a variety of protocols to do calculations and obtain further results.
For many people on Java projects such setup is reality, but always hidden from the general audience. It is enterprise stuff, meaning: nobody will ever see it. But this time I am lucky. The frontend is visible for everybody. Everybody can use my work to calculate a pension plan. This makes me happy. There were also others on the team, like my colleagues Nick and Rob, who worked mainly on the CMS side, producing the nice looking interface, so I have to share the praise