Sessions

Programmer Anarchy

Friday 10.00 - 10.50 in: Honey Badger

The Agile movement shifted the relationship between clients and developers in a profound way. In waterfall processes, clients specified large amounts of functionality, then nervously faded into the background until the fateful day-of-delivery. With Agile, developers strove to engage with clients continuously, and delivered much more frequently against their needs. A new trust was established.

At the Forward Internet Group in London, we are implementing a second major shift between clients and developers. The trust of the clients in developers evolves into a broader trust of the developers to deliver business value without resorting to a series of well-defined stories. In essence, the business has empowered the developers to do what they think is right for the business. This model, popularized by Facebook, has several labels, but the one we prefer for our flavor is Programmer Anarchy.

We will start with stock Agile, and begin to apply environmental factors that led us to drop “standard” Agile practices. We will also watch as well-defined Agile roles evaporate completely as other environmental factors are applied. Finally, we will arrive at Programmer Anarchy, an organization often following none of the standard Agile practices, having no BA or QA roles, and even missing any managers of programmers.

We will summarize our environmental factors, and postulate on the required and optional factors. We will make bold, controversial assertions. We will back up these assertions with actual experiences.

Programmer Anarchy has garnered rave reviews at every conference venue, and is provoking the intended debate on our current Agile thinking.

Tags: Agile Creative Mastery Rebel

Micro-Service Architecture

Thursday 10.00 - 10.50 in: Grinding the Crack

SOA, service-oriented architectures, burst on the scene in the new millennium as the latest technology to support application growth. In concert with the Web, SOA ushered in new paradigms for structuring enterprise applications.

At the Forward Internet Group in London, we are implementing SOA in unusual ways. Rather than a few, business-related services being implemented per the original vision, we have developed systems made of myriads of very small, usually short-lived services.
In this workshop, we will start by exploring the evolution of SOA implementations by the speaker. In particular, lessons learned from each implementation will be discussed, and re-application of these lessons on the next implementation. Challenges (and even failures) will be explicitly identified.

We will arrive at a model of the current systems: An environment of very small services that are loosely coupled into a complex system. We explore the demise of acceptance tests in this complex environment, and the clever replacement of business metrics in their stead.

Finally, we will conclude with the surprising programmer development process impacts of this architecture. Indeed, bedrock principles of Agile have been rendered unnecessary, something that equally surprised us.

Tags: Architecture Back end Creative Hard Core