Presentation: "sky.com: Behind Britain's Entertainment Infrastructure"

Time: Wednesday 15:00 - 16:00

Location: Fleming Room

Abstract:

I'm sure you've heard the phrase "you couldn't use an agile process with our project". We don't think this is true. We'll tell you how we built two content management applications serving six websites edited by over 40 journalists at Sky. We used Grails to build completely test driven bespoke web apps and sites going from concept to alpha in 4 weeks and to live in 17 weeks. Agile processes do work with larger projects in huge, established organisations. We have proven this using XP and Scrum on a cross functional team that has been running successfully for over two years.

Keywords: Agile, Communication, Groovy, Grails, Lean, People, TDD, Scrum, XP

Target Audience: Those that want to know how two successful agile teams were able to deliver large, enterprise wide websites quickly and efficiently.

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Glenn Saqui, Agile Energizer

 Glenn  Saqui

Glenn Saqui started his software career at a small life science software development company. While creating software for the life science field Glenn learned to handle the huge amount of data that researchers where producing.

He then moved to the UK and was introduced to the betting industry. Glenn spent a number of years working for Betfair. Here Glenn dealt with the problems that come with being one of the biggest internet sites in Europe.

Glenn came to Sky 2 years ago to join a team of agile experts on their road to building Sky's entertainment offering. While at Sky, Glenn has been a key member of the team driving a test driven green field CMS project from inception to alpha in 4 weeks, beta in 8 weeks and live in 12 weeks.

In his spare time Glenn can be found building Grails plugins, responding to tech questions on the Grails mailing list, or out on a run where all his good/any ideas come from.

Jon Mullen, sky.com ScrumMaster

 Jon  Mullen

Since starting his career as an Ada developer, Jon has spent over 13 years in the IT industry (BAE Systems, Sema Group, Sun Microsystems and BSkyB) and has first hand experience of the "Good, Bad & Ugly" world of IT.

In his current role as a ScrumMaster at BSkyB, the three factors that he believes contribute most to his teams success are recruiting the right people (not resources), team ownership and the application of lean principles.

Outside of work Jon spends some of his time working on new ideas and exercises designed to aid retrospectives and other Scrum/XP practices.