much ado about agile
November 15th & 16th 2006
Conference was a success, thank you for coming.
The first agile conference in Vancouver
The conference program is two days of exciting and informative presentations, seminars, and tutorials with something for everyone; from the agile curious to the agile project veteran, from the manager to developer, for large organizations developing large mission critical enterprise systems to intimate organizations developing safety critical embedded systems. Topics as varied as agility and data warehousing, agile organizational practices, and agility in a regulated domain. Presentations delivered by both world class authors and local practioners. All are coming together to present their ideas and experiences in a two day program. There is truly something for everyone.
Program Highlights
The program is organized into two parallel tracks with a number of special sessions, tutorials and keynote addresses.
Track 1 People Trump Process
Agile is about people and this track highlights agile approaches to managing interpersonal and organizational issues with sessions such as Neil Harrison's "Beyond Agility" and Linda Rising's "Agile Retrospectives".
Track 2 Tools and Techniques
Agile raised the profile of a number of good software development practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD). These sessions are intended to provide you with specific agile skills. This track also presents agile techniques for data bases, data warehousing, embedded systems and working in regulated environments.
Tales from the Western Front
Local developers relate their real hands on agile project experiences in a series. An opportunity to see how "they" did it and learn from their experience.
Panel: your questions about Agile
During the conference we will circulate cards for you to write your questions about agile. At the end we put your questions to a panel of our speakers.
Some of the Speakers
Mary Poppendieck - Lean Software Development
Mary has been in the Information Technology industry for thirty years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she brings a practical, customer-focused approach to software development problems
Mary is author of "Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development" and will deliver the opening keynote presentation.
Scott Ambler - Agility in the Data Base
Scott W. Ambler is the Practice Leader: Agile Development in IBM Rational's Methods Group and is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Agile Unified Process (AUP), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. Scott is the (co-)author of several books, including Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a columnist with Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Scott will talk about Agility in the Data Base. Simply, if application developers can benefit from agile software development philosophies and techniques, can data professionals do the same?
Linda Rising - Agile Retrospectives
Linda Rising's background includes university teaching and industry work, in telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons systems. An internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, and the change process, Linda is the author of numerous articles and four books-Design Patterns in Communications, The Pattern Almanac 2000, A Patterns Handbook, and Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, written with Mary Lynn Manns.
Linda will describe one of the most important principles behind the agile manifesto that, "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." How can this be done? Linda's presentation will introduce techniques for project retrospectives, whether they are agile or not. The techniques help teams discover what they're doing well so that successful practices can continue and identify what should be done differently to improve performance.
Jennitta Andrea - Functional Testing
Jennitta Andrea has expanded the vocabulary and imagery associated with agile methods to include Cinderella, step sisters, dental floss, sushi, and fingerprints. When she joined her first XP project in 2000, Jennitta wondered: "Will we stop using UML and use cases completely?", "Will the analyst role become extinct?", and "What does an effective functional test really look like?". As a hands-on practitioner on close to twenty different agile projects since then, Jennitta has been a keen observer of teams and processes. She has written many experience-based papers for conferences and software journals, and delivers practical simulation-based tutorials and in-house training covering: agile requirements, process adaptation, automated functional testing, and project retrospectives. Jennitta was elected to the Agile Alliance board of directors in 2004, and re-elected in 2006. Jennitta is a strategic partner and senior consultant with ClearStream in Calgary, Alberta.
Jennitta will talk about the challenges of functional testing. Whether you are working on an agile project that develops tests before developing system code, or working on a more traditional project that has left functional testing until the end, different choices must be made in each situation in order to develop a successful functional testing strategy. It is crucial that automated functional test suites employ established testing best practices in order to avoid common pitfalls.
Neil Harrison - Beyond Agility
Neil Harrison is a assistant professor of computer science ant Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah. Until recently, he was a distinguished member of technical staff at Avaya Labs, where he developed communications software. He has been involved in software development and research for over 20 years, both as a developer and team leader. He has studied software development organizations for over ten years and is a co-author of Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development. He is acknowledged as the world's leading expert on pattern shepherding and the PLoP shepherding award is named after him.
Neil will answer for you the question "what do some organizations have that enable them to deliver software with high quality and high productivity time after time? He and his colleague James Coplien studied highly successful software development organizations, and found factors that are deeper than the agile (or non-agile) processes they used. Successful organizations have many similar structural characteristics, which we have captured in patterns of organizations. Some of these patterns underlie the foundations of many agile methodologies, and provided inspiration for some of them. Beyond agility, though, they are at the basis of many successful teams, regardless of whether they are agile or not.
Ron Moriscatto
Ron has been looking for a better way to do things his entire career. A developer since the 70's, he worked in the health care delivery arena, writing simulations of delivery systems and tying them to the period's information systems. During the 80's and 90's he focused on military systems, where he developed simulations supporting the conceptual and proof-of-principle phases of the product life cycle. From there he moved to engineering development, serving as the software domain expert on systems engineering teams. In this role he was deeply involved with integrating software considerations into what had previously been a hardware-based military safety program. For the last four years, he has returned to the non-military sphere lending his wealth of experience to both the scientific instrumentation and chip manufacturing spaces. He is a firm believer that agile methods are indeed leading to that better way.
Ron and his colleague Brian Shoemaker will deliver an XP and embedded systems tutorial and how agile fits into the regulated environment and XP
Preston Smith - Expanding Agile beyond Software
Preston has specialized in time-to-market issues in product development for over twenty years. He is coauthor of the classic, Developing Products in Half the Time and has helped many companies shorten their development cycles by applying its methods. More recently, he has shifted his emphasis from speed to flexibility as he has observed companies hamstrung by rigid development processes, and he currently is preparing a book on flexible product development to be published by Jossey-Bass in October 2007.
Preston will talk about expanding agile beyond software products. Agile has proved itself for developing software products, but what about products such as automobiles, medical devices, and shoes? Some of these incorporate embedded software and some have no software. Most companies developing such products use a phased development (waterfall) process. A major difficulty they face is that the methodologies they use do not allow for-in fact, punish developers for-changes during development. Yet, change is the essence of innovation. How can we adapt agile methods to such products so that they too can accommodate, even embrace, change during the development cycle?