Not to take anything anway from Jay, this is a great summary of really useful user story estimation techniques and I love the fact that each one is simply explained without any apologies for not being "the way everyone might do it". Jay's first line says it all:

"One of the great things about working as a consultant is the ability to try out many different ideas and adapting your personal favorite process to include things that work. This article gives the details about user story estimation techniques that I've found effective."

 Always good to see the word getting spread. My personal favourites from Jay's selection are:

• Vote independently
• Take the largest estimate
  

and of course

• Bribes :)

This job is well deserved payback as Rich has been paying his dues as a runner and working hard as a writer for while now. Nice one Rich!

 I've spent some really enjoyable hours in the past with Meera and the folks at JavaLobby on book reviews and this was a fun chance to talk about our own book and some of the work behind producing a Head First title.

• At the heart of great software are great people
• Software Consultants Care Too (well, great ones do)
• 'Commit' like your life depends on it
  

While this is the end of the beginning, it's not the end of the end so I'll be posting more in the future, both here and on the Head First blogs.

To get the ball rolling I thought I'd talk about what Head First Software Development doesn't do, which is get bogged down in particular process terminology and baggage. This was a conscious decision, and we hope it makes the book a better, more useful, more relevant and less academic guide for the practicing software developer.

Enjoy!

It's been a really long while now since I last posted here, but I do have good reason. No, I've not just been lazy, in fact I've been so busy everything else took a back step for a while there.

But now I'm back and to show you I haven't just been off enjoying the pubs around Guildford (although I do intend to in the coming weeks, as well as getting married of course... more on that in the next post) I thought I'd make a belated announcement that Dan Pilone and I have finished off an published our book, "Head First Software Development".

Writing this book was a real labour of love (more love than labour, but believe me the workload was there!) but now that it's finished I can honestly say that I am extremely pleased with the way this book turned out. If there was one book I would have liked in my early days, this would have been it. In fact, if there's one book I can use lessons from right now, this book is up there too. That's how proud of it I am, and also how useful I really think it is.

Ok, that's it for now but I am most definitely back in the swing of things so look out for xome interesting updates to this blog and others as I now get a chance to devote some time to things other than InDesign*

Cheers!
Russ

*InDesign is the main tool used by Head First team to create the Head First series. 

• Open DS
  Top of the list, Open DS was a great piece of software that made it dead simple to create a directory service a la LDAP. Including all the , this simple open source project provides scaleable, distributed, replicatable and driver-less storage, and it's planned to be extended to other directory services beyond LDAP in the near future.
• Rails in GlassFish, on top of the JDK (and not forgetting IDE support for Ruby in NetBeans)
  This was a great moment, although obviously contrived by the guys involved in the scripting interface to the JVM for the announcement at JavaONE. For the first time I was able to see a Rails application running on top of a JEE container, Glassfish, running in turn on top of the JVM. This is great news to anyone developing with Ruby and Rails as this means that my applications can just as easily be deployed to a production-class JEE web container as my existing JEE apps. And since this is all made possible because of JRuby and the scripting extensions to the JVM, I can even have my code healthily interacting with Java code should I see fit. I thoroughly recommend that you download the Netbeans 6 beta with Glassfish (the JEE components) to see this working, plus NetBeans is a pretty nifty Ruby editor as well.
  
• Java FX (script)
  Part of the Java FX family, the script component could either be a case of too little too late, or a great success in creating rich content applications. So far I'm not sold, although I've only had a go at creating a few applications so far. To me it just seems like another scripting language, except that this one does not easily run straight in the browser (the demos require Java Web Start, not exactly seamless or ideal) and since with almost the same amount of code in Flex I can build some sassy rich content front-ends as the equivalent code in a frame-based hello world in Java FX Script, I'm not convinced by this one yet. However, others are finding this pretty exciting so I keep it here just in case I've missed a massive Gotcha.

Those were the big highlights for me, there was lots and LOTS of other useful information being spread around the various technical sessions but those were the biggies for my money. Over the coming weeks I'll try and demo a lot of these innovations as they find their way into my projects, starting with Open DS and how that can work alongside with Rails...

... more to come soon!