Presentation: TweetMature Legacy Seeking Sexy New Technology for Fun and Profit Extracting Gold from Legacy Code

In this talk we describe the huge opportunity for innovation in Legacy systems! We argue there has never been a better time for creative legacy renovations which leverage new hot technologies – languages; data bases; web; cloud and Agile practices. Many talented developers turn up their noses or run away in fear from what they see as baroque environments with arcane tool chains. Talent panic often pushes for a grand rewrite using modern technology. Sadly experience shows the grand rewrite has too much risk and way too little business value. Hence given legacy investments the only option is innovation!

We illustrate legacy innovations via several case studies spanning a wide spectrum of legacy systems including: mainframe IT; Unix products; military systems; telecom; data banks and multi-vendor EAI and EAP applications. We explain the appropriate practices, teams, and tools to achieve high impact renovations by inserting new technology. We discuss appropriate investments in training, tooling and practices for different legacy environments. We look at approaches to ensuring lasting high value relationships between legacies and bleeding edge technology.

Presentation: TweetThink? Compute! See!! - End User Programming for Thinkers

In this talk we discuss our experience trying to make state of the art software technologies including functional programming, collaborative computing and visualization consumable by demanding customers we call Thinkers. The emerging discipline of Computational Science brings Thinkers and Software Experts together to create environments for Thinkers.  

Thinkers are well educated domain and problem focused computationally literate end users.  On a day by day basis thinkers live in BigData to collaboratively solve their business and technical challenges. Thinkers need a capability to Think-Compute-See and to actively participate in problem solutions. They reject being passive misunderstood requirements-changing Agile customers; have no use for end user tools for dummies; and question the cost and complexity of accepted software engineering approaches. Lacking better alternatives they often resort to hodgepodge collections of scripts and arcane tools.

Presentation: TweetFostering Effective Collaboration Between Designers and Developers During Envisioning and Development

Effective collaboration between designers and developers is essential for the success of any software project. While we tend to dwell on the conflicts, tensions and differences between these groups of people, you’ll be surprised to discover that they have more in common than you think.

In this talk, Dave takes a brief look at the similarities between these two groups, then presents a number of techniques and strategies that can used to build respect, foster trust, and improve communications between them, while at the same time, delivering successful products.

Topics will include how to effectively pair designers and developers to minimize conflict and maximize productivity, how to avoid the ‘bicycle shed’ effect, how to create a product vision and roadmap both designer and developer can agree on, how to conduct upfront design in an Agile project, developing an honest contract between designers and developers, why developers should use visualization, why designers should code, why self-managing teams need benevolent dictators, how to decide what not to build, why designers and developers need to be domain experts, and when designers and developers should stop listening to their customer.

Keywords: Agile, Agile development, product management, project management, product design, product planning, new product definition, product verification, agile requirements, acceptance criteria, requirements capture.

Target Audience: This session is intended for product managers, development managers and product team members (e.g. designers, developers, analysts, testers) who are involved in or responsible for product planning, definition and design.