I stopped using Eclipse...

Ever had hassle with your numerous Eclipse plugins? With update-manager complaining about missing dependencies, which nobody ever could resolve?

With re-installing your (free) development environment every now and then?

After giving the latest Eclipse ("Galileo") a try, I just dumped it: After configuring Spring, Scala, webservice, subversion and a few other plugins, the whole app did not even bother to start...

Having been Eclipse user for several years, I am really grateful for their contribution to (Java) software development. But it has become an overly complex monster in my (humble) opinion.

I lighthearted moved over to IntelliJ-IDEA - their slogan "develop with pleasure" became true within the first hour of using IDEA (I tried both 8.1.3 and their early-access version 9). Grails and Groovy support is excellent, Scala plugin working fine, subversion support the best I ever had, even Clojure working (ok - that one can definitely be improved, but true lisp programmers should stick to Emacs)

Proud user of

Architecture Evaluation with ATAM

I recently conducted several short software architecture evaluations (a.k.a. assessments) according to ATAM with small teams.

Once again I was positively impressed with the outcome: Within hours (literally!) we matched current quality goals to architectural approaches,
identifiying risks and non-risks... without even starting any tool...

So - just in case you need an overview of your architectural risks - go
and learn ATAM (for German readers: there's a free pdf on my website)

Give yourself (or your team) at least a day for an extensive evaluation -
half of which you will need to brainstorm and investigate your stakeholders' current quality goals.