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

Time: Wednesday 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.

Large Scale Agile Expert Bas Vodde, Odd-e

Large Scale Agile Expert Bas Vodde Bas is originally from Holland, however has lived in China, Finland and is currently again living in China. In the 90s he worked as a developer in Holland and felt a mismatch between what he experienced as working and between "what the official literature said you should do". That was solved with the introduction of Extreme Programming and evenmore so, with Agile Development in general.

In the beginning of 2001, he had enough of the "normal life" and moved to China where he started working for Nokia. Here, he gained experience on very large projects and the traditional ways they are run. After this he became even more convinced that Agile Development is the way forward, for all size projects.

In 2005 he moved to Helsinki, Finland to introduce Agile Development and in particular Scrum, in Nokia Networks. For two years he watched dozens of teams adopt scrum and other agile practices. Recently, he moved back to one larger project to focus on a smaller scope.

His main interests are in Scrum and especially how to use it within large companies and large projects. He also focuses much on the technical practices, especially test-driven development (including refactoring) and continuous integration because he strongly believes you need a well-factored code base if you want to be fast and flexible. His hobby interests have been lean production and quality management and, of course, programming.

See also Bas' blog at odd-e.com/blog

Founder and CEO Dave Thomas, Bedarra Research Labs

Founder and CEO Dave Thomas 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.