SoftwareGR

Carl Erickson, Atomic Object

When: March 27th, 2007, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Where: Work Play Space, 941 Wealthy Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506

The underlying premise of this talk is that agile practices, genuinely and correctly applied, will improve your development process. From a broad range of experience, Atomic Object’s agile teams have identified approximately 100 common ways that teams and organizations trying to adopt agile practices can run into trouble. The perils and pitfalls are organized into 14 sections. Each pitfall is described, and strategies for overcoming or avoiding are given.

The 14 categories cover a broad range:

Customers, Pairing, Testing, Professional Responsibility, Advanced, Leadership, Project Management, Design, Business Model, Culture, Tools, Magic Totems, Misconceptions, People

This talk appeals to all job roles (developers, project managers, testers, analysts). People new to agile practices learn something about those practices by hearing a discussion on adoption failure points. People who have been trying to move their organization to agile practices get ideas and suggestions for tackling their particular issues. Experienced agile developers have an opportunity to share their experience.

Speaker Bio

Carl Erickson is the president of Atomic Object. Combining their agile software development process with clients’ domain expertise, Atomic Object helps companies build new globally competitive products in markets as diverse as aerospace, automotive testing, color measurement, health care and materials handling. Carl also teaches a summer class on software craftsmanship at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. Carl has authored papers in the areas of software testing, process improvement, and computer science education.

Atomic Object has been using agile development practices, mostly of an XP flavor, since 2000. The material in this talk is based on problems, mistakes, and learning we’ve done in growing a small, contract, agile shop from 2 to 20 developers, insights gained from consulting on software process improvement with much larger companies, and from six years of attending local, regional, and national conferences and learning from smart people like Ron Jeffries, Bob Martin, Elisabeth Hendrickson, Brian Marick, Bret Pettichord, Michael Bolton, Chad Fowler, and Scott Ambler.