Better Software - September 2008 - (Page ADP14) KEyNOTE SESSIONS AgIlE EXPERTS SHARE INSIgHT WEDNESDAy, NOvEMBER 12, 8:45 a.m. Seven years Later: What the Agile Manifesto Left Out Brian Marick, Exampler Consulting Although the Agile Manifesto has worked well to help many organizations change the way they build software, the agile movement is now suffering from some backsliding, lots of overselling, and a resulting backlash. Brian Marick believes that is partly because the Agile Manifesto is almost entirely focused outwardly—it talks to the business about how the development team will work with it. What it does not talk about is how the team must work within itself and with the code. Even though those omissions were appropriate then, now more is needed. Teams starting agile need to know that more discipline is required of them, and that discipline is fruitless without a strong emphasis on skills. Teams need to recognize that success is not just fulfilling requirements. It is also increasing productivity and decreasing the consequences of mistakes. Perhaps most of all, teams need to respect themselves and believe they deserve joyful work. Join Brian to find out whether you’re really doing Agile or if you are agile in name only. Brian Marick (marick@exampler.com, www.exampler.com) was a programmer, tester, and team lead in the 1980s, a testing consultant in the 1990s, and is an agile consultant in this decade. He was one of the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and is a past chair of the board of the Agile Alliance. Brian is the author of two books—The Craft of Software Testing and Everyday Scripting with Ruby—and a number of articles. His consulting concentrates on blending formerly-independent test teams into agile projects, the use of executable examples (a.k.a, tests) to drive creation of products, and helping programmers learn their craft by pairing with them. WEDNESDAy, NOvEMBER 12, 4:30 p.m. Beyond Best Practices: Keeping Agile Agile Dan North, ThoughtWorks Adopting “best practices” seems to be an intrinsic part of the transition to agile—with many organizations creating special process teams and hiring methodology consultants to implement and enforce best practices. These practices often are seen as a cornerstone of an agile change program and are even touted as a selling point—“Our projects will surely succeed if we follow best practices!” And of course, there are industries and ecosystems that have grown up around accreditation, auditing, and support of specific agile methods. Do they actually help you, or might they in fact be working against your organization? Dan North argues that best practices are useful only up to a point. Rigidly enforcing them is counter to the values of agile and will eventually drive away your best people. He looks at the motivations behind agile initiatives and introduces the Dreyfus model of skills acquisition—a framework for exploring the effectiveness of best practices in your team and organization. Dan shows that by understanding how people learn and develop, you can evolve your own agile practices and keep them relevant and applicable to the practitioners in your context. Dan North has been working with software for twenty years, starting with playing Star Wars at a games company in the late 1980s. After graduating, he did real work, programming C on UNIX. Dan has worked in digital imaging, investment banking, ISPs, telcos, and car leasing. His sense of timing is demonstrated by his writing billing software for WorldCom in the late 1990s, consulting on sub-prime mortgage systems, and writing a trading platform for collateralized debt obligations (the product of choice for the credit meltdown). Since 2002, Dan has been a consultant with ThoughtWorks (http://thoughtworks.com) where he advocates simple, pragmatic common sense. He likes to talk about SOA, lean software development, NLP, and behavior-driven development (BDD). Dan occasionally blogs at http://dannorth.net. 14 CAll 888.268.8770 OR 904.278.0524 TO REgISTER • W W W. S Q E . C O M /A D P R E g http://www.exampler.com http://thoughtworks.com http://dannorth.net http://WWW.SQE.COM/ADPREg
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