GOTO is a vendor independent international software development conference with more that 90 top speaker and 1300 attendees. The conference cover topics such as .Net, Java, Open Source, Agile, Architecture and Design, Web, Cloud, New Languages and Processes

Dan North, Agile troublemaker, developer, originator of BDD

Dan North

Biography: Dan North

Dan writes software and coaches teams in agile and lean methods. He believes in putting people first and writing simple, pragmatic software. He believes that most problems that teams face are about communication, and all the others are too. This is why he puts so much emphasis on "getting the words right", and why he is so passionate about behaviour-driven development, communication and how people learn. He has been working in the IT industry since he graduated in 1991, and he occasionally blogs at dannorth.net.
 
Twitter: @tastapod

Presentation: Simplicity, The Way of the Unusual Architect

Time: Tuesday 12:10 - 13:00 / Location: Gold Coast Room

Dan North talks about the tendency developers-becoming-architects have to create bigger and more complex systems. Without trying to be simplistic, North argues for simplicity, offering strategies to extract the simple essence from complex situations.

Presentation: Embracing Uncertainty

Time: Tuesday 15:10 - 16:00 / Location: French

Agile software development was born over a decade ago, with a gathering of industry luminaries in Snowbird, Utah. They were frustrated that so much ceremony and effort was going into so little success, in failed project after failed project, across the software industry. They had each enjoyed amazing successes in their own right, and realised their approaches were more similar than different, so they met to agree on a common set of principles.
Which we promptly abandoned.
The problem is that 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. We really do prefer the Devil we know.
For the last couple of years 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.