Steven Fraser

How do Agile/XP development methods affect companies?

Does the discipline inherent in Agile/XP methods change the way a company does business in contrast to the influences of traditional plan-driven or ad-hoc software development practices? Are there differences in strategies for customer engagement, staff resourcing, and program management? Companies live or die depending on the accuracy of scheduling/budgeting projections and the ability to do more with less. Lean development, SCRUM, XP, and other agile methods may stress companies in hitherto unanticipated ways leading to both evolutionary and revolutionary organizational change. This panel will dis cuss the differences and similarities between XP/Agile and more traditional software development practices with regard to their impact on companies.

Retrospectives on Peopleware

Since its publication twenty years ago, Peopleware Productive Projects and Teams (Dorset House, 1987), by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, has enlightened software professionals and non-professionals alike. Peopleware introduced among other topics - team gel, design patterns, the Furniture Police - to the software engineering community and suggested that sociology matters more than technology or even money. This unique session with the pioneers of our profession is an opportunity to learn, reflect, and share experiences -- looking forward to the future. This compendium consists of brief bios and first person retrospectives on Peopleware.

A fishbowl with piranhas: coalescence, convergence or divergence?

Agile software development practices including XP and Scrum have risen to prominence within the software engineering community over the past ten years. Are agile software development practices converging? Are some practices becoming more integrated and/or more widely adopted than others? In the early 90s there was a convergence of object-oriented design methodologies - is a similar pattern being repeated within the agile software development community? Several years ago conferences featured debates on the number of practices inherent to XP - or for that matter what constituted XP. Is the Agile community on the verge of converging to standardization or do individual practices retain their individually and evangelists/disciples? A somewhat related question is: Can an agile practice be applied out of the box or is some assembly required? What does it take to get agility going in an organization? Does it work as advertised? What practices work and play well with others? Hear the experiences of panelists in their attempts to actually make agile work in the real world. From Crystal, DSDM, FDD, LEAN, Scrum, to XP (and others) - participants will to share their perspectives and experiences. Be warned - this fishbowl will be stocked with piranhas.

Open source software in an agile world

Open Source Software (contrasted with proprietary or “closed” software) has become a more widely accepted enterprise solution not withstanding some issues related to intellectual property rights and issues of liability and indemnification. Open Source Software (OSS) takes collaborative software development to a global extreme – OSS also provides a mechanism for decreasing time-to-market, improved quality, and reduced development costs. This panel will serve as a catalyst to discuss strategies, tools, and communities focused on the development and application of open source software.

Learning more about software best practices

What constitutes a software best-practice and what are the best strategies to become aware, learn, adopt and adapt such practices? This fishbowl will bring together seasoned professionals who will meld a mix of academic and industry perspectives with an agile flavor.

Design patterns: beginnings and futures

This panel will bring together the surviving authors (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson) of the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley) and it is dedicated to the memory of the fourth author John Vlissides. The discussion will focus on the beginnings of their collaboration that led to the book and a look forward to the future.

The ultra challenge: software systems beyond big

How can the ultra large systems (ULS) of the future be built if they will have the complexity of trillions of lines of code, maintain continuous 24x7 operations with no downtime, and live in a hostile environment with unpredictably changing requirements? This panel will discuss and debate the challenges posed by ultra large systems in terms of their design, growth, deployment and dynamics.

Fostering software robustness in an increasingly hostile world

Software can kill. What are you doing to stay alive? Our world faces an increasingly hostile environment with challenges in complexity, technology, social engineering and clashing cultures. Failure to achieve sufficient software robustness can lead to customer dissatisfaction, financial loss, or in extreme cases -- loss of life. This panel brings together differing contexts and solution approaches.

Escaped from the lab: software practices in large organizations

What are some of the common practices for taking new ideas and converting them into products? What are the key obstacles that cause the failure of research prototypes turned into commercial products? This workshop examines the practices that have worked well and the approaches that can help developers and managers avoid customer problems.

Echoes?: structured design and modern software practices

Structured Design has been described as a traditional approach and an alternative technology by the SEIs (Software Engineering Institute) software technology roadmap on their website [July 2005]. While website visitors are cautioned that structured design does not lend itself to object orientation the method has clearly influenced the evolution of object-oriented design practices. This panel brings together software design visionaries to discuss and debate echoes in software design practice.