Maven is a tool for managing and building Java-based projects. According to it's Apache home, Maven's primary goal is to allow a developer to comprehend the complete state of a development effort in the shortest period of time. In order to attain this goal there are several areas of concern that Maven attempts to deal with:

• Making the build process easy
• Providing a uniform build system
• Providing quality project information
• Providing guidelines for best practices development
• Allowing transparent migration to new features

Darryl Parks is a Technical Lead at Monsanto, Inc. managing a team of developers for a field sales intranet site supporting sales analysis and compensation. Darryl first started at Monsanto in 1995 as a contractor and became a full-time employee in early 2006. Darryl recently became a Test First Development mentor for Monsanto.

As a technical lead Darryl finds little time to actually spend developing so he joined the Stl Java User's Steering Committee as a way to keep abreast of the technologies and direction of the market place.

Darryl graduated with High Honors with a Bachelors in Managing Information Systems from Idaho State University in 1987. He has had a varied background in languages including RPG, Cobol, C and later into VB, MS Access, ASP and now Java. Business areas range from Issues Tracking sessions for Tiger Teams at the Idaho National Engineering laboratory, Cost Accounting and Payroll and Account Payables for municipalities.