Track: Agile

This year it was 10 years since we were first introduced to Agile. Practices such as TDD and pairing has become the default way of working for many developers and Scrum has become common practice in many organisations. And still there is a lot happening in the agile community. This year the agile track will focus on what's happening in agile. What's hot and what's not. You will get some good pointers of what you should be focusing on next, and maybe even a bit of controversy.

Thursday

10:00-10:50

Domain-Driven Design and Agile

In this session, I will talk about how we have applied Domain-Driven Design in a project about 25000 man-hours size. I will talk about how DDD promotes a close customer relation, how we have worked with the domain and the domain model. I will also present patterns used in the project as well as some extensions to DDD as described in the book by Eric Evans. But mote of all, I will talk about how DDD works when it is applied systematically in a project over many years.

Tomas Karlsson

Tomas started his IT career as consultant and Java developer in 1999. From 2004 he has been working with software development in public sector, mainly with JEE, EJB, and JBoss as development platform. Tomas has experience in the entire range of software development from business architecture with process and information modeling, requirements and development. Over the last five years he has combined these skills in software development projects using Domain-Driven Design together with Scrum.

11:10-12:00

Beyond Method - Using Systems Thinking to Deepen Your Mastery of Agile

You've seen development methods come and go. If it seems like the methods were never good enough, that's because they weren’t. No recipe can be the right one always. But, we don't need to throw our methods away; we need to look beyond them, towards how we think. In this session, you will see how systems thinking tackles the counter-intuitive nature of many challenges. Your existing knowledge of how agile works will be complemented with an understanding of the principles on which it works.

Tobias Fors

Tobias Fors is a software management consultant, specialized in helping teams and organizations be more effective, ship software, and have fun together. He has helped numerous well-known Swedish companies improve the way they do software development.

13:00-13:50

Tell Me Why - A 21st perspective on Agile

Simon Sinek created a TED talk about "The Golden Circle" that asks us to start with WHY we are doing something or creating something before we declare the WHAT. In between these are the HOW, creating 3 concentric circles. In this session, we will apply the Golden Circle to Agile adoption for 21st century innovative companies.

Jean Tabaka

Jean Tabaka, Agile Fellow with Rally Software, is continuing to learn about software development principles, processes, and practices. She seeks humane approaches that deliver high value in our business communities. Her work in product development flow reaches beyond traditional Agile. She also works in systems thinking and complexity theory. Jean holds a Masters in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of “Collaboration Explained” and other articles on Agile organizations. Jean blogs at www.rallydev.com/agileblog and tweets as @jeantabaka.

14:20-15:10

Why common agile practice isn’t agile

In 2001 the Agile Manifesto quietly described a set of values and principles that helped align a huge community of frustrated software practitioners. Finally we had an antidote to the dogmatic heavy processes we’d been forced to endure for the past couple decades. In this talk Jeff describes how much of today’s common agile practice has started to backslide towards the very thing we were avoiding 10 years ago. Jeff will describe how you can detect if you’re starting to backslide. You’ll hear some examples of real process innovation that to some appear to break agile rules but actually stays true to the spirit of agile development.

Jeff Patton

Jeff makes use of over 15 years experience with a wide variety of products from on-line aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records to help organizations improve the way they work. Where many development processes focus on delivery speed and efficiency, Jeff balances those concerns with the need for building products that deliver exceptional value and marketplace success.

15:40-16:30

Making distributed teams work

Developing software even with a collocated team is a complex endeavor. When the teams are distributed, especially over the geographical boundaries, it adds much more complexities to the whole production process. This session will closely discuss the challenges in such context and ways to make the distributed team development less hassleful and more effective to all the parties involved.

Thushara Wijewardena

Thushara has been leading geographically distributed software teams over 12 years. During that time she has employed a variety of traditional and Agile processes. As the Project Director of Exilesoft, Thushara enjoys her day-to-day work with a large pool of technical specialists and a diversified clientele/integrated teams distributed in Norway, Australia and Sweden.

17:00-17:50

How to select an agile vendor

When you are going to implement a new project, how are you going to determine when, if and how to buy from agile vendors? How do you determine if one supplier is better than another one? Choosing an agile vendor requires new strategies to procure agile vendors, new ways of thinking and other types of contracts. In this seminar, you will be guided through some principles and some alternatives will be presented.

Klas Skogmar

Klas is a PMP certified project manager and management consultant with an extensive background in both software and business development. He regularly holds courses and seminars in both agile development and other areas, such as PMBOK and ITIL. Klas has worked as a project manager, teacher, coach, mentor, deployment manager, problem manager and developer. He is also an entrepreneur with experience from founding and managing companies in various industries over the years.