GOTO Amsterdam (June 17-19, 2015) is a vendor independent international software development conference with more that 50 top speakers and 500 attendees. The conference covers topics such as AngularJS, Disruption, Docker, Drones, Elasticsearch, Hadoop, Microservices & Scrum.

Presentation: "The Secret Assumption of Agile"

Track: Scrum / Time: Thursday 14:30 - 15:20 / Location: Graanbeurszaal

The presenter has had repeated success delivering Agile projects across more than a dozen years. One of the most important factors to that success is recognizing that the programming style of developers on the team is not well­aligned with Agile. This presentation discusses this flaw and remedies for it, as well as touching on several other key success enablers.

The initial element of success is being able to write code that is easily changed. This style of coding, rooted in the beginnings of the Agile movement, is not publicized nearly enough (and even ignored in eXtreme Programming Explained, the first Agile book.) We illustrate this different style with several real projects.

We move on to outline how teams on our projects have acquired the skills to write programs that are easily changed, and suggest a model for how to improve. We discuss a training program, developed in the mid­90’s (and the roots of the ThoughtWorks University curriculum) that addresses the transformation.

We conclude by suggesting that team structure is essential to adopting necessary change.

Target Audience
This is a general presentation targeted to managers, team leads, and developers. All will be somewhat skeptical that change is needed, and this presentation will initiate those vital internal debates.

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Fred George, Early Adopter of OO & Agile, Advocating MicroServices & Programmer Anarchy

Fred George

Biography: Fred George

Fred George is an industry consultant, and has been writing code for over 46 years in (by his count) over 70 languages. He has delivered projects and products across his career, and in the last decade alone, has worked in the US, India, China, and the UK.
He started ThoughtWorks University in Bangalore, India, based on a commercial programming training program he developed in the 90's. An early adopter of OO and Agile, Fred continues to impact the industry with his leading­?edge ideas, most recently advocating MicroService Architectures and flat team structures (under the moniker of Programmer Anarchy).
Oh, and he still writes code!

Twitter: @fgeorge52