SoftwareGR

Ron Jeffries, 
Independent Consultant

When: March 28th, 2006, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506

The March meeting of XPwm features Ron Jeffries. The first half will be a presentation from Ron on the confused dynamics of project dates. The second half will be an open question session. Bring your thorny problems, your myths in need of debunking, your agile adoption stories, your test-driven dilemmas or your complaints about the weather. Ron promises to tackle them all.

Never shy of making provocative statements, Ron Jeffries recently wrote this on the subject of projects and deadlines:

“In my opinion, every project should begin with high goals and a short deadline. And, with rare exceptions, every project should deliver its product by the deadline. Really. Every single project.”

But who works to make the date?

“It seems like every development project begins with the date, and we’re held responsible for ‘making the date.’ Making the date is not a development responsibility.”

In this talk Ron considers the distinct and essential roles of management, customers and developers with respect to projects dates.

Speaker Bio

Ron Jeffries is a prolific author, industry leader and practitioner in the Extreme Programming (XP) movement. A true XP pioneer, Mr. Jeffries began practicing this agile development process in 1996. He was one of the original authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (http://agilemanifesto.org), and was the on-site coach for the first XP project at Chrysler in 1998 (http://www.xprogramming.com/publications/dc9810cs.pdf). Now an independent consultant, he has presented numerous talks and published several papers on the topic. He and his teams have built operating systems, compilers, relational database systems, and a wide range of applications.

In addition to his consulting work, Ron Jeffries is author or co-author of several articles and books including Extreme Programming Installed and his most recent book, Extreme Programming Adventures in C# (DV-Microsoft Professional). Ron is editor of the website XProgramming.com, and is, by far, the most prolific on-line author in Extreme Programming and related topics.