Dave Thomas, Father of OTI, CEO of Bedarra Corporation

Dave Thomas

Biography: Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, professor, consultant, architect, executive and investor. Dave is founder and CEO of Bedarra Corporation; which provides virtual CTO and CEO, business mentoring and seed investment to emerging companies. Recently formed Bedarra Research Labs undertakes speculative research on applications of emerging software technologies.

Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO and president ofObject Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs)and led the commercial introduction of object and component technology.The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technologycompany.

He was also the principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAgeSmalltalk and Java tools and virtual machines including the initialwork on popular multi-language Eclipse.org IDE. OTI pioneered the useof virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping thefirst commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in theestablishment of IBM's Pervasive computing efforts and in particularthe Java tooling.

Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University, and the University Of Queensland and is widely published in the software engineering literature. He is a popular humorous albeit opinionated keynote speaker. Dave remains active in various roles within the technical community including ECOOP, AOSD, Evolve, and Agile Development Conference, Agile/XP Universe and OOPSLA Onward. He is a founding director of the Agile Alliance and most recently a founder of Open Augment Consortium. Dave writes expert columns in Otland Online in Germany, and the Journal Of Object Technology in Switzerland where he also serves on the editorial board.

Software Passion: The Joy of Building Great Software Together

Links:
Personal website: davethomas.net
eclipse.org
agilealliance.org

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

Track: Iconoclasts: Entertaining Rants / Time: Wednesday 14:05 - 15:05 / Location: Room 102/103

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: "Lessons for Lean and Agile Software Management"

Track: Agile from the Outside / Time: Thursday 16:50 - 17:50 / Location: Falconer Salen

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.