Project Management

Job is not a place for feats. But sometimes you have to be brave to overcome and complete that others considered impossible.

What happened? #

Oracle has changed release and licensing policy for JDK:

• The JDK still remains completely free for use. The thing that is changing is the availability of updates to specific versions of the JDK.
• The only free for use in production JDK binary available from Oracle (as of JDK 11) will be the OpenJDK binaries. These will only have public security patch and bug fix updates for six months, until the release of the next version.
• There is no free LTS release of the JDK from Oracle (for use in production).
• Users can continue to use any binary of the JDK (the Oracle version or OpenJDK one) indefinitely. They will not, however, continue to get updates to these JDKs once public updates end.
• Commercial users who want to continue to get security patches and bug fixes for JDK 8 or subsequent LTS releases after public updates have ended will have three options:
  1. Purchase a commercial support contract from Oracle.
  2. Use a different binary distribution of the OpenJDK, which has security patches and bug fixes backported to it.
  3. Create their own binary distribution from the OpenJDK source code and backport updates themselves.

How does it encourage agility? #

• Most of the companies are not willing to purchase commercial support from Oracle.
• At the same time, they need to get latest security updates.

So, what companies have to do –- is to upgrade JDK on production environments more frequently: at least every 6 months.

Working on different projects I often see the same problems with application design.

A must-see speech by Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin on programmers responsibilities in digital world and 9 principles every programmer should follow (“The Coders’ Code”).

One of the challenges for start-ups or any new project is to reduce the amount of work while still delivering a full-featured product. Agile methodologies address this challenge on the project management level. Let’s discuss another approach to address it on the architecture level: UI-first development.

For those, who not yet familiar with Scrum, I highly recommend to watch the “Scrum Training Series” presentations and the AgileMethodology.org website.

A Scrum Reference Card is also useful to understand what the Scrum is, it’s processes, roles and practices.

The presentations describes the Scrum process step by step.

Introduction to Scrum #

One more book worth reading - “Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. It’s essentially a Holy Bible for every manager!