QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Russell Miles, Co-Author of Head First Software Development

Russell Miles

Biography: Russell Miles

Russ Miles is Principal Consultant at Simplicity Itself and works with their clients to continuously and sustainably delivering valuable software.

Russ' experience covers almost every facet of software delivery having worked across many different domains including Financial Services, Publishing, Defence, Insurance and Search. With over 16 years experience and through consultancy, coaching and training, Russ uses a holistic view of the software delivery process in order to implement multi-faceted continuous improvement programmes touching on everything from developer skills and practices, creating and evolving the best architectures and designs for a given domain, through to advising the management of various companies on how to apply lean and agile thinking and practices to better tune their return on investment from their software development effort.

Russ is also an international speaker on techniques for achieving the delivery of valuable software as well as a published author, most recently of "Head First Software Development" from O'Reilly Media. He is currently working on two new books; "Programming Spring" for O'Reilly Media that launches the Simplicity Itself technique of "Test Driven Learning" for the first time publicly, and another book, working title being "Field Guide to Continuous Improvement for Software Delivery Team Members" that captures the different thinking tools and techniques that a professional software developer can apply concretely to their own continuous improvement goals.

Twitter: @russmiles

Presentation: You are not a software developer! - Simplicity in practice

Track: The Developer Track / Time: Wednesday 14:30 - 15:20 / Location: Whittle Room

In this talk, Russ Miles will share the patterns and anti-patterns he's observed when teams attempt to really deliver valuable software.

Taking an irreverent view of the goals, architectures, technologies and processes that have become part of our everyday lives, Russ in typical polemical style aims to impart real principles and practices that guide him when helping teams deliver, especially when sometimes they've forgotten how to do that at all!

Russ aims to help you never look at what you do for a living the same way again and start delivering valuable software frequently and speedily now.

Presentation: Play & Grails, a fireside chat between two leading web server-side frameworks

Track: The Modern Web Stack / Time: Friday 10:20 - 11:10 / Location: Churchill Auditorium

Where this talk is coming from: It's a fresh spring evening, Play and Grails, the top two rapid development frameworks on the JVM are having a chat by the fireside ...

Grails: «Hey Play, is scala's compiler still slower than a tortoise?»

Play: «it's not that bad, my dynamic friend, and it's a one time hit. How much performance does your runtime cost you these days? 20%, 30%?»

Grails: «You know it's less than 10%, but you get a lot for that 10%!»

Grails: «Why don't you try some Spring integration? It's the standard.»

Play: «This again? I don't need your standards, it's not my Type, safe?»

Grails: «Is that product placement? you know thats not allowed!»

Play: «I just like things to be safe.»

Grails: «So ... Monads?»

Play: «well, maybe we could've chosen a better name, but it is the correct logical name... Seriously, though, Gorm? Do you know what that sounds like?»

...and so we leave our intrepid, contending, cantankerous and downright competing frameworks arguing long into the night. Russ Miles will be convening them to meet again, with developers who know each framework, warts and all, to carry on the discussion. There will be no agendas, no sponsorship, and no holds barred (although maybe the odd pun).

Training: Impact Mapping - How to Make a Big Impact by building Valuable Software Products and Projects

Track: Training / Time: Monday 09:00 - 16:00 / Location: Rutherford Room

The first principle from the Agile Manifesto states: "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software." but how often do you capture the real value of what you're developing and delivering and use that to help prioritise your work?

In this tutorial, Russ Miles of SimplicityItself & Gojko Adzic of Neuri Consulting will teach how to practically apply Impact Mapping for just this challenge Impact Mapping is a strategic planning technique that prevents organisations from getting lost while building products and delivering projects by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better roadmap decisions. Impact mapping can help you build products and deliver projects that make a valuable impact, not just ship software.

The participants of this interactive workshop will learn the practices of Impact Mapping and try it out in practice on several realistic examples to understand the key facilitation techniques and learn how to run and apply Impact Mapping sessions in their organisations.

Key learning points of this tutorial are:

  • how to create good user stories
  • how to ensure that you're building the right product
  • how to align the activities of delivery teams and the organisation around them
  • how to make an impact with software products and projects
  • how to communicate overall goals and vision to delivery teams
  • how to facilitate impact mapping sessions
  • how to build a delivery roadmap and backlog with impact maps

Keywords: product owner, business analyst, agile developers, agile testers, business stakeholders, impact mapping, specification by example, requirements, product backlog