Last Updated - 8/4/00 - Go Back
| The JSL Study Group focues on Java, OO and best practices, all in the context of Software Engineering. This document presents a challenging educational program that covers these areas of interest. |
Program for Summer Fall 2000 - Announcement 7/31/00
Tester Project - The product is a lightweight automated testing tool for Continuous Testing. The project uses a variation of Extreme Programming for its process.
Team Session 1 - 8/4/00 - We did the Concept and Initial Analysis phases, followed by a Planning Game where we used Story Cards to help the customer and team design a Release Plan. About a dozen people signed up for the Pair Programming slots at Jack's house.
Cindy - How about this for the jsl.jcon.org page? - Jack
Who We Are
The Java-as-a-Second-Language (JSL) special interest group (SIG) focuses on:
- The use of Java to express sound OO designs.
- Object Oriented Analysis and Design best practices.
- Advanced Software Engineering practices such as architectrure, frameworks and reuse.
We meet every Thursday at 7:00PM at New Horizons off of LaVista Road. We have an associated mailing list for Java, OOAD and general Software Engineering discussion. Meeting announcements go to this list, so be sure to join the JSL mailing list if you come to meetings. There are no requirements to join, other than a sincere desire to improve your skillset.
Meetings
In a typical meeting we review a problem area of some type, develop it using a formal but lightweight process, design it using our favorite OO modeling tools, and implement the first few simple iterations in Java. Members also present practice or real world systems they've built that are related to current topics. The real value of the meetings is the far ranging discussion, which offers many lasting insights.
Meetings include plenty of hands-on participation by those who attend. Lately we often break up into programming pairs, since one learns best by doing. But since the focus of the group is on the big picture, important quality and customer considerations are not sacrificed for the sake of simplistic academic exercises. One of the goals for the group is for participants to gain the kind of experience that is necessary for beginning programmers to progress into advanced software developers.
Note this is not a study group for learning Java, but how to think at higher levels such as process and architecture, with the role of Java as merely the implementation language of choice. In the long run this is far more important than the language-of-the-month. :-)
Time has shown that JSL participants get the exposure to Java and OO that they need to get their Java certification, as several of our members have. You may contact Michael Ivey (with link), the ListMaster, to get on the mailing list for the group or Cindy Nelson (with link), the WebMaster, for site related inquires.
"In our field, everything we learn has a half-life of 3 years."
"Let's keep learning."