Dan North

Dan has been writing software for over 20 years, and was a principal consultant with technology consultancy ThoughtWorks. Now a recent transplant to Chicago, he spends his time helping teams become more effective at delivering software, and presents at conferences such as JAOO, Agile and OOPSLA on topics ranging from learning theory to behaviour-driven development. He has published articles in the Java Developers' Journal and Better Software, and for CIO newsletters and the DSDM consortium.

Website

http://dannorth.net/

Twitter

http://twitter.com/tastapod

Embracing Uncertainty - the Hardest Pattern of All

Sessions

Patterns of Effective Delivery

Track: Agile, friday 15:15 - 16:05

Some teams are orders of magnitude more effective than others. Over the last year or so I've been working with, and observing, some very good teams with quite exceptional - and rather surprising - habits. In this talk Dan introduces the idea of delivery patterns - patterns of effective behaviour in delivery teams - and describes some of the more unusual but effective patterns he's been collecting.

Embracing Uncertainty - the Hardest Pattern of All

Track: Keynote, thursday 08:30 - 09:45

Agile calls for us to embrace uncertainty, and we are desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty. So much so that we will replace it with anything, even things we know don’t work.Over the last year or so Dan has been studying and talking about patterns of effective software delivery. In this talk he explains why Embracing Uncertainty is the most fundamental effectiveness pattern of all, and offers advice to help make uncertainty less scary. He is pretty sure he won’t succeed.