Jim McCarthy
President, McCarthy Technologies
Software for Your Head
Tuesday, September 18, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

How many geniuses are born in a century? What if you were able to assemble all of the intelligence and virtues of your employees into one “person”, a multi-person, could you create a corporate genius? We believe so and have done it with many organizations. In this keynote, Jim McCarthy will show you how to successfully aggregate the intelligence of your employees to solve tough problems and achieve greatness at will.

Ivar Jacobson
Chairman, Ivar Jacobson International
Enough of Process--Let's Do Practices
Tuesday, September 18, 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM

Today there are many methods, processes, techniques and so on that attempt to help project teams conduct their work. While there are indeed some important differences between them, the commonalities are far greater: the end goal is for all of us to get working software. Thus adopting complete processes does not make practical sense. Instead, we should focus on being able to mix and match ideas from many different sources inside or outside our own world and compose these ideas to develop a better way to work. Over the years, we have more and more come to realize that these “composable” and separate ideas are well represented by practices. Practices are first class citizens; process is just a composition of practices. Practices are to software development teams what use cases are to software systems. They have a beginning and an end, and they provide identifiable values to the stakeholders. Practices come from individuals from different camps around the world, such as the agile camp or the process improvement camp. A practice-centric view of software development, as opposed to a process-centric view, is the new paradigm shift.

Scott Ambler
Practice Leader Agile Development, IBM Rational
Agile Strategies for Geographically Distributed Development (GDD)
Wednesday, September 19, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

Agile software development (ASD) an geographically distributed development (GDD) are two of the most important software process trends this decade which are just now starting to be combined successfully. Traditional wisdom is that GDD requires a serial, documentation-heavy approach, an approach which is the antithesis of Agile. Practice shows that Agile often shows that we need to rethink traditional wisdom. This keynote overviews the challenges associated with GDD and how agile strategies can be applied to overcome many, although not all, of these challenges. Lessons from IBM's India labs and the Agile@IBM team will be shared.

David Intersimone
Vice President of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist, CodeGear
The Future of Software Development in a Virtual World
Friday, September 21, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

For the past 60 years, developers have worked closely together, mostly in the same building or campus. The Internet, talented developers throughout the world and collaborative development environments have dramatically changed the way software is being developed. Software that used to be created in a lab or cubicle farm is now being created in coffee houses, bagel shops and online virtual worlds. What are the required best practices for successful software projects in a distributed, virtual development team environment? How must programming change to meet the future needs of the global software economy? David Intersimone (“David I”), chief evangelist at CodeGear (from Borland) will use Second Life to present a unique keynote of predictions for software development in a virtual world.