KEYNOTES

Scott Ambler, Practice Leader Agile Development, IBM
Evolving Agile: Time to Address the Uncomfortable Issues We’d Prefer to Avoid
Tuesday, July 24, 12:30 PM–1:30 PM

As agile software development techniques and concepts cross the “technology adoption chasm,” we find that the concerns on the right-hand side of the chasm are much different than those on the left. We are now facing critical issues which until now many within the agile community have preferred to avoid talking about. Activities such as modeling, documentation, exploratory testing and database development must become more explicit within our methodologies. We need to find ways to fit into IT governance frameworks, process maturity frameworks and regulatory guidelines. Other issues such as certification, enterprise architecture, enterprise business modeling and outsourcing must also be address. Finally, we must help the business take a more active role in development, reform IT financing and in general manage their IT portfolio effectively. Most importantly, we need to find ways to do these things without bogging down our development efforts with needless bureaucracy. The techniques exist, and now is the time to start discussing them openly, regardless of how uncomfortable we find them. This presentation reviews these issues, and in many cases the existing recommendations for addressing them. It is time for the agile community to consider the whole IT picture.

Larry Constantine, Chief Scientist, Constantine & Lockwood Ltd
User Experience and Interface Architecture
Tuesday, July 24, 5:30 PM–6:30 PM

The architecture of a building is visible to its occupants and visitors, but the architecture of software is, for the most part, hidden from view. The exception is the user interface. The overall organization and high-level structure of the user interface as a whole can have a profound impact on usability and user acceptance, yet, all too often user interface architecture is little more than the fallout of other decisions about program and database architecture. This keynote highlights the challenge of user interface architecture and its place in the larger context of software design and architecture. It will illustrate with examples the impact of interface architecture on usability and user experience, and it will suggest how a change in perspective to post-modern thinking can point the way to more successful applications that offer better user experience.

Ivar Jacobson, Founder and Member of Advisory Board, Jaczone Inc.
Next Generation Process with Essential Modeling
Wednesday, July 25, 12:30 PM–1:30 PM

Next Generation Process will stand on the shoulders of modern software development practices coming from different camps: the unified process camp, the agile methods camp, the process maturity camp. Each one of them contributes different capabilities: structure, agility and improvement. Next Generation Software Development Practices will take us a giant step further: 1. It won’t be just agile; it will be smart, 2. It will have a very light core which contains the essence of modern software development practices, 3. It will keep the practices separate but compose them when applying them in a project, 4. It will grow and include 100s of practices from many areas: technical, social and organizational, 5. It will offer a refreshing user experience learning from the game industry, and 6. It will close the process-project loop so that the developers can update the practices as they work. Modeling will continue be an important practice, but it should focus on the essentials. This talk promises to explore the outer limits of software development.

Dan Pritchett, Technical Fellow, eBay
Randy Shoup, Distinguished Architect, eBay
The eBay Architecture: Striking a Balance between Site Stability, Feature Velocity, Performance and Cost
Friday, July 27, 9:00 AM–10:00 AM

System designers constantly struggle with how to build a feature that fulfills product requirements, while keeping the system fluid and maintainable. As product requirements get more and more complicated, tighter integration with existing data and product features becomes increasingly important to keep the negative impact to the user experience at a minimum. If the page or program loads more slowly, while giving the user the rich experience, have we succeeded or failed? In this session, eBay's Dan Pritchett and Randy Shoup will delve into the strategies and driving principles that guide eBay's development teams across the world. They will talk about real-world examples of how these principles will allow you to design what, until now, has been thought to be impossible: scalable, high performance and agile systems that do not get in the way of the organization's feature velocity. The guiding principles, methodology and patterns are what have allowed eBay to scale a large development organization across four continents.