Founder and CEO Dave Thomas, Bedarra Research Labs

Dave Thomas is a popular, pragmatic, humorous keynote speaker and a recognized thought leader. He has a track record for being at the leading edge of software tools, runtimes and practices. He pioneered the use of numerous technologies including enterprise and embedded object technology. He is an editor and regular columnist of the Journal of Object Technology. Dave is the recognized expert in large scale Lean and Agile development having invented "Just in Time Software" at OTI (now IBM OTI Labs) and used it since the mid 80s to develop products from embedded systems to mainframes applications including the IBM VisualAge and Eclipse Products and virtual machines. He was a founding Director of the Agile Alliance.

Presentation: "Hey You! Get On To My Cloud! - Application Development in the Clouds"

Time: Monday 15:15 - 16:00

Location: To be announced

Abstract:

Cloud Computing is predicted to be the dominate infrastructure for next generation IT and the platform for software as a service applications and products. SalesForce is used globally and pioneered trusted SAAS applications for the enterprise. Google Apps boasts half a million small businesses. Amazon EC2 hosts hundreds of large corporate and small businesses with both MS and Oracle announcing EC2 availability. Recently Microsoft announced the Azure Platform it’s in cloud computing.

Cloud Computing presents new opportunities and challenges for application development and deployment including web scale performance, reliability and security, occasionally disconnected operation, and web data persistence. Cloud solutions range from generic infrastructure such as VMWare Cloud and Amazon EC2, to generic web applications such as Google Apps, to business focused Force.com which provides tight integration with customer and sales data. Each of these presents different opportunities for business and developers to leverage the programmable web.

Ajax has enabled a zero install application development with compelling UIs which rival native platform GUI. Recently there has been flurry of high performance JavaScript VMs by Google, Mozilla and Apple Safari, which combined with IDE and TDD support enable serious professional development in JavaScript.

In this talk Dave will discuss the issues, Cloud Client, Server, Database programming models, technologies/tools and practices for cloud developers including Serious JavaScript, Dynamic Languages, Functional Programming - Map Reduce, LINQ and Erlang, Restful Services (URI, MIME, Stateless, JSON), Schema-less Databases, Disconnected Operation, and Security.

Workshop: "Lean and Agile In the Large - Principles, Practices and Experiences for Large Scale Software Development"

Time: Thursday 09:00 - 12:00

Location: To be announced

Abstract:

Lean and Agile practices have made a major positive impact on productivity and quality of life for individuals and development teams.

In this tutorial we focus on the challenges and practices of using Lean and Agile in large development organizations. Large scale software is typically built and maintained by large numbers of geographically distributed developers, uses multiple technologies and tool chains, often building a family of products using one or more platforms. Large scale software must respond to the business need to commit to delivery functionality and dates months ahead. Throughout the tutorial we call on examples from large global organizations that have made the transition to Lean and Agile Development. The small group format of the tutorial encourages participants to discuss their specific challenges.

We introduce new practices in Envisioning, Definition, Planning and End Game which compliment the Agile practices used for Development. These practices allow business to gain agility while addressing their needs for on time delivery and governance. We discuss how to integrate best practices Lean Product Engineering while respecting and encouraging the wide adoption of empowering agile practices.

The practices provide proven practical techniques for large scale Agile challenges such as Voice of The Customer: Tangible Requirements and Acceptance Testing; Role of Architecture, Models and Components, Management of Features vs. Components: Planning, Estimating and Resource

Allocation: Dependency Management and Release Management; Scrum of Scrums and Communities of Practice, and Enterprise Development Dashboards and CMM Compliance. We describe the necessary organization structures, roles, artifacts and tooling needed to streamline large scale software construction.