QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.
Dan North, TweetAgile troublemaker, developer, originator of BDD
Biography: Dan North
Dan writes software and coaches teams in agile and lean methods. He believes in putting people first and writing simple, pragmatic software. He believes that most problems that teams face are about communication, and all the others are too. This is why he puts so much emphasis on "getting the words right", and why he is so passionate about behaviour-driven development, communication and how people learn. He has been working in the IT industry since he graduated in 1991, and he occasionally blogs at dannorth.net.Presentation: TweetDecisions, decisions
Architecture isn't just the static "shape" of your software. It's the set of decisions that define it, enabling — or inhibiting — change, evolution and improvement over time. It is also the decisions about how you verify, deploy, version, manage and monitor an application. Each of these decisions is a trade-off: there are no Best Practises. Some decisions can have a huge forward impact, and it isn't always obvious which ones!
In this talk Dan offers several of his Patterns of Effective Delivery as strategies to help you improve your architecture decision-making. He won't tell you whether to prefer stability or uncertainty, DRYness or coupling, latency or throughput, manual or automated testing. That's up to you. But he might help you go into those decisions with your eyes open.
Presentation: TweetAin't no cure for the distributed blues
A year ago I embarked on a three month experiment with the CIO of a Chicago-based trading firm, to see whether we could execute a programme of organisational change, coaching and software delivery from London. We are now around a year into the experiment. There have been ups and downs, surprising wins and surprising challenges. I've been coaching - and learning from - the CIO, his managers and some of the technical folk. We've been introducing ideas from Lean and Theory of Constraints, I've been remote pairing, solo coding and struggling with timezones and distance. I've also picked up a lot more business airmiles than I was expecting, sent a puppy by air freight and developed a taste for fine coffee. This is an experience report of that year. It contains no silver bullets.