It all starts with Scott Bellware and Lisa Crispin’s talks on Wednesday morning. Scott gives a talk on the myths of developer productivity, showing you how lean project management techniques can help you get more efficient and stop confusing productivity for efficiency. Lisa leads you through the seven key success factors for agile testing.
After a short break, you’ve got a myriad of agile topics to choose from. Lisa Crispin continues leads further into the world of agile testing with a lecture on an agile approach to dealing with defects. Kevlin Henney shows you why individuals and interactions are more significant than processes and tools and Tom Gilb shows you how to deliver stakeholder value through understanding that agility is the tool, not the master.
After lunch, Geoff Watts gives product owners tips on how to improve their return on investment in Scrum. The product owner role is often ignored on agile conferences, so we’re really pleased to have talks addressing their concerns this year. If you’re not a product owner, then Kevin McNeish’s talk might be the one for you. He bridges the world of developers with the agile world in this talk on .NET Design Patterns for Agile Software Processes.
The last few years our industry has had massive attention on testing and test driven development. Tom Gilb says it’s time for a wakeup call, and tells you why QA still has its place in his talk on “Lean Quality Assurance”.
Continuing the constructive criticism of our current practices, Geoff Watts asks if self–organization actually works, and if teams get motivated by it in his final talk for the day.
Lisa Crispin rounds off day one’s agile tracks with a whole team approach to testing. She’ll explain how the whole team approach, leveraging multiple skill sets and planning in time for testing activities, leads to more testable code and better testing solutions. Participants will leave with some practical ideas to try right away.
On NDC’s second day you can attend even more great talks on agile topics and attend a workshop on Kanban principles. Mattias Skarin takes you on a discovery tour and experiment with some of the principles that drives real value in his workshop “Experimenting with Kanban principles”. There will be limited seats at this workshop so be sure to book your tickets before May 18th when we open for reservations for the workshops.
If you rather attend regular sessions, Jurgen Appelo leads you through seven approaches to achieving competence in a self–organizing system in his talk “Big–Ass View on Competency” Thursday morning.
After the break you’ll get a glimpse into how they do product development at TANDBERG R&D, and how their process has enabled TANDBERG to outperform all competition in the video conferencing and telepresence market during the last decade when Olve Maudal gives his talk on “Product Development in TANDBERG”.
If you’d rather mix architecture with agility, Juval Löwy presents you with a service–oriented development process that you can apply to your WCF–based products to achieve robust applications, manage requirements and ensure faster time to market in his talk “Service Oriented Development Process”.
After the break, you can dive further into the intersection of architecture and agility when Harald Søvik and Morten Forfang shows you how to deal with modularization, testing and technical debt in large agile projects. This is a real life experience report from a 120 000 hour Scrum based project and there should be lots of proven tactics you can employ in the trenches of development and project management.
While we assert that software development is not manufacturing, we often slip into manufacturing metaphors and analogies and then fail to extricate our explorations of how software development unfolds from manufacturing. In his provocative talk “Software is not Manufacturing”, Scott Bellware looks at just how handicapped software development becomes at the hand of these engrained manufacturing perspectives.
Estimation is looked upon as a black art by many. Kjetil Moløkken Østvold presents results from a case study detailing the challenges faced by Lindorff Group as they simultaneously adopted agile practices and introduced a new system for requirement handling and estimation. He shares how they provided a framework for structured discussions regarding individual requirements, and how this helps maintaining the focus of IT projects.
Jurgen Appelo follows straight after Kjetil with a talk on how to tackle the challenges of leadership and governance in complex organizations, where teams are self–organized.
Finally, Roy Osherove rounds off day two with a look at what makes teams productive, and what makes team leaders effective in his talk “Effective Teams & Leaders”. This is your chance to experience different side than TDD of Mr. Osherove.
Friday’s schedule is a goldmine if you’re into agile practices. Agile guru, Mike Cohn, takes over one of the conference rooms for the entire day giving six consecutive talks! You can choose to sit in for the whole day or cherry pick sessions on Scrum, user stories, estimation, planning and team organization.
Mike isn’t the only agile legend taking the stage at NDC this Friday. Robert C. Martin aka “Uncle Bob” gives a talk on “The Solid Principles of OO & Agile Design” as well as two talks on clean code and Roy Osherove continues on his new course with a talk on being an effective team leader.
Finally, Johannes Brodwall and Niklas Björnstedt, two legends from the Norwegian agile community, team up for a talk on “Agile Release Strategies”.
Last year we had all the agile themed talks on the final day of the NDC, this year we’ve spread them out over three days enabling you to catch three times as many agile talks. Still, you won’t be able to see them all – we challenge you’re sense of agility and choose the ones that you’ll get the most from. Whether you’re a developer interested in agile practices, a manager in charge of software development teams or working with product development, the Norwegian Developers Conference has it all this year. Let’s consider it an exercise in backlog prioritization.
by Anders Norås
