Dave Thomas, TweetFather of OTI, CEO of Bedarra Corporation

Presentation: Tweet"Why Modern Application Development Sucks! Death by Objects, Agile, Middleware ..."

In this talk we take a humorous but critical self examination at modern application development - technology, practices and tools; to try to understand why building and evolving applications is so difficult and expensive.  Why is technical debt of epidemic proportions given how great everything is? Where does all the effort and expense really go? We argue it is time to look at the application development value chain to obtain a sensible and balanced way forward so we can leverage new new tools while using the best of old old.

Everyone is aware of the features and benefits of these technologies and practices but is the glass half full or half empty? Can we learn anything from the generations of developers before us? How discerning are we about the next new thing from GOTOCON or vendor X?   Are the problems due to skills or latent accidental technical complexity?  Are we using the right tools/practices for the right things?  Is the iPhone the only place where App development is cool!? Can we help make application development in general much more enjoyable rather than blue collar programming with scrums?  

Presentation: Tweet"Lessons for Lean and Agile Software Management"

The principles of Lean and Agile software are short, clear and straightforward. Increasingly both small high performance organizations and large enterprises frustrated by the lack of impact transitioning to Agile. Too often euphoric Lean and Agile aspirations quickly turn into a few standardized practices/tools enshrined across the organization with more dogma than some of the BigM methods they were intended to replace. The recent negative reaction to Kanban and relative ignorance of Cumulative Flow Diagrams illustrates the failure of many Agilists to embrace even simple change. In other cases managers maintain waterfall and Agile “accounting” rather than think through how to properly report progress to their organization.

In this talk we step back and look at a few of key management principles Embrace Change, Sustainable Pace, and Visualize Flow which are essential for a lean and agile software organization. We discuss examples of how successful managers employ these ideas to realize systemic continuous improvement yielding mire flexible, transparent and productive organizations.