Living the Java life

Dr. Jamilur Reza Chowdhury (left) talks to Hafiz Ahsan (Right) during the workshop

Titled Agile Approaches Toward Software Development: eXtreme Programming (XP) and Others, the workshop was held at the university auditorium having Dr Jamilur Reza Chowdhury, vice chancellor of Brac University as the chief guest. Dr Yousuf Mahbubul Islam, director, Research and Advisory Services, Brac University chaired the session.

After the chief guest, session chair and the Moderator of JPgroup addressed the even, a presentation discussing the background of the usual Water Development and Iterative Cycles was made by Hafiz Ahsan, vice president of J P Morgan, who has worked with other major names like ThoughtWorks, Valtech and Lucent Technologies earlier in his career.

Hafiz completed his Masters from Texas A&M University after graduating with a Computer Science and Engineering degree from Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET).

"These processes have some significant problems like increased overhead costs, little focus on individuals and also requires predictive planning," said Ahsan, while speaking about some of the problems of the traditional methods.

The Speaker then introduced the audience to the latest practices involved in software programming across the world like Terse Iterations, Refactoring, Testing Automation, Daily Stand-up meetings and some other terms.

The Agile Processes were then elaborated, which includes XP, Scrum and Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM).

Ahsan then focused on XP and concentrated on its different sectors like team necessities, tools required, Iteration, Tracking and Requirements.

"Along with the advantages that XP provides through faster delivery, customer satisfaction, product stability and knowledge sharing, it also has drawbacks like less time for design and development architecture, less trace ability and less control on the project," explained Ahsan while talking about the advantages and drawbacks of XP.

After his presentation, the Vice-President of JP Morgan answered some questions raised by those in attendance.

Most of the attendees at the event comprised of students, faculty members from various private and public universities, programmers, software engineers, analysts and important personnel from the various software houses of the nation.

"We are extremely satisfied with the response and we hope to organise some more events and workshops in the near future," said Ashikuzzaman, moderator, JPgroup.

Small projects for Computer Science and Engineering department (CSE) students will be channelled through the group pretty soon. Also, there will be a monthly sessions organized by the group regularly.

Efforts for an online technical presentation of this kind that would involve participation of reputed non-resident Bangladeshi IT professionals from some major companies like Cisco, Oracle, Sun and IBM are also underway.