Speaker Series
Alexander von Zitzewitz: Maintaining Technical Quality of Software - It's the Architecture, Stupid !
When: October 11, 2011
Most non-trivial software systems suffer from severe technical and structural debt. This burden acts like an ever increasing tax on every code change or new feature to be added. The cost of change is growing significantly faster than the code base. Although this is more and more a known fact, very little is done to address this problem in a meaningful way. Shouldn't one assume that project managers and stake holders would do everything in their power to fight structural and technical debt to keep the system maintainable and the cost of change manageable?
The session elaborates why this problem is so difficult to solve and identifies potential solutions with a high return on investment. As the title indicates, software architecture has a very important influence on the overall maintainability and technical quality of a software system. During a recent informal poll at the New England Java User Group 80% of the attendees agreed, that architecture is the most important long term success factor for a software system, while only 1% had a process in place to monitor and maintain architectural quality rules.
About Alexander von Zitzewitz
Alexander v. Zitzewitz is founder and managing director of hello2morrow and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field of software architecture and development best practices. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a masters degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.
Moses Hohman: Lean Startups & Customer development
When: September 13, 2011
Lean Startup is new and, it's sometimes easy to forget, mostly unproven. But it builds on older ideas that have more evidence going for them: Lean Thinking, Agile, user research and many others. These give Lean Startup a solid foundation of values and principles, but the practices of lean startup are still very much an open question. Do we really understand how to conduct customer development? How is MVP software development different? When is something "validated"? When and how should your practices change?
I approach these issues from the perspective of a longtime agile software developer turned startup employee, turned UX enthusiast, turned co-founder of my own startup. My talk will be interactive, and I hope to engage an audience coming from many perspectives--including development, UX and business--who will bring their own insights to the discussion.
About Moses Hohman
Moses Hohman is co-founder of Human Practice, a web-based service that helps patients find doctors and doctors find patients through people they trust. Previously he was VP of Development at Collaborative Drug Discovery, a bay-area cheminformatics startup. He has been learning, practicing and teaching agile software development since 2000. He has a PhD in physics from what now almost seems like a former life, and he lives with his family in Chicago.
Video: Lightweight project tracking with burn-up charts
If you were unlucky enough to miss our closing meeting this past June, you missed a great talk! However, there is a silver lining. The talk is available online here.
Carl Erickson & Mike Marsiglia: Lightweight project tracking with burn-up charts
When: June 28, 2011
Carl and Mike will be talking about the use of burn-up charts as a vital element of data-driven project management. Atomic has been using this simple technique for more than five years.
Burn-up charts are a lightweight method of tracking a team's progress toward completing a project. Burn-up charts do this by visualizing overall project scope and the rate of task completion over time. These highly visible charts help facilitate predictable (in time and money) delivery and increased customer/team alignment.
During this hands-on presentation, Carl and Mike will break down how Atomic creates and uses burn-up charts to manage projects. Participants will learn about complexity points, relative estimation, burn-up chart creation/management and pitfalls associated with using burn-up charts.
About the presenters
Carl Erickson received his MS and PhD in computer engineering in 1991 from Michigan State University, and a BS in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1985. As a faculty member at Grand Valley State University from 1991 to 2000, he taught computer science courses in networking, operating systems, architecture, and object technology. During this time, Carl was principal investigator on two National Science Foundation grants for developing operating systems and architecture laboratories.
In early 2000, seeking an opportunity to apply his teachings, Carl took a position as Vice President of Technology Development for Deltamode, a startup company based in Austin, Texas. Twelve months later, Deltamode was shuttered due to insufficient working capital, providing Carl with two life-changing lessons: (1) write software for the REAL needs of REAL people, and (2) agile practices can change the software world. Partnering with Bill Bereza, Atomic Object was born in the summer of 2001.
Michael Marsiglia began working with the founders of Atomic Object in the summer of 2000 after his freshman year in college. After completing the computer science degree at Grand Valley State University in 2003, Michael made the transition from intern to full time employee. Over the next few years Michael played a vital role in helping to establish the identity and best practices of the small company.
In 2005, Michael took a life opportunity when he decided to take a job on the east coast with X-Rite Inc. While at X-Rite, he helped to bring an agile atmosphere and culture to his team. By showing others his excitement for pair programming and testing, he helped raise both the morale and productivity of the team. During his time at X-Rite, Michael also had the opportunity to interact with a wide range of people from different departments. He engaged in international business development including facilitating sales while traveling in Japan. Living on the east coast and working for X-Rite was a very positive and educational experience for him.
In the summer of 2008, Michael moved back to Grand Rapids. He was delighted to find a welcome home at Atomic Object. He looks forward to helping Atomic Object sustain its impeccable reputation for first class software, and extend its business offering.
William Pietri - 10 Years in Startup-Land
When: May 18th, 2011
Interested in doing a startup? Thinking about joining one? Just want to know how Silicon Valley works? Former Grand Rapidian and current San Francisco startup CTO William Pietri answers your questions on the startup lifecycle.
This dynamic talk will be primarily audience-driven.
About William Pietri
William, the son of a systems analyst and a serial entrepreneur, started earning his lunch money with a computer at the age of 13. He got involved with web community pioneer bianca.com in 1994, and with the Agile movement in 2000. Currently he’s the CTO and co-founder of a venture-backed startup that helps people use their social networks to make better purchasing decisions. He is strong advocate of Lean Startup methods.
JR Jenks - Using Agile methods when designing medical devices
When: April 26th, 2011
J.R. Jenks is proud to say that he grew up with the computer industry. He first learned to program as a child when programming meant linking to an HP2000 mainframe using a Teletype and a 100 bps modem. He recalls that his family owned one of the first models of a personal computer, the KIM-1, which they built from a kit.
That sense of curiosity and experimentation has carried J.R. forward and he has remained at the leading edge of computer technology and design for almost 20 years. He wrote the software for the first public OLE for Process Control (OPC) demonstration at National Manufacturing Week 1998. He also wrote one of the first automated test harnesses for the Win32 platform, bringing the Extreme Programming practice of "Relentless Testing" to COM and Windows development. J.R. was an early practitioner and advocate of XP in his capacity as Technology Architect at Geneer Corporation.
J.R. is AgileTek's Chief Technology Officer. He brings to the job his hands-on experience and proficiency with a vast array of technologies, including XML, Enterprise Java, Open Source Software, .NET and Automated Testing.
His industry background includes applications and design done for nuclear power plants, aerospace, insurance and a wide variety of manufacturers.
Walter Bright - The D Programming Language
When: March 22, 2011
Walter Bright graduated from Caltech in 1979 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked for Boeing for 3 years on the development of the 757 stabilizer trim system. He then switched to writing software, in particular compilers, and has been writing them ever since.
Walter's latest work has been on the D programming language: "D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability."
OSS tools for embedded development: Unity, Ceedling, CMock, & CException
When: February 22, 2011
About the presentation
Our group of scientists have formulated a suite of tools that make growing robust C applications an enjoyable endeavor. We take care of providing the checks and balances and also utilities for run-time error handling. This mingling of forces facilitates organic growth of maintainable, robust, and infinitely powerful applications that can effectively rule the world. Unity, Ceedling, CMock and CException are open-source (free) tools whose aim is to make setting up and growing embedded C applications a trivial effort so that developers can focus on features and content.
The first half of the evening, we will be providing a high level overview of our tools as well as announcing our new website whose intent is to serve as an information hub to explore, learn and access these tools for use in your embedded endeavors. The second half will be focused on delving further into these tools and show them in action.
About the presenters: Greg Williams & Mike Karlesky
Greg Williams graduated from Michigan State University with a BS in EE and CPE and started his career in Tucson, AZ as a test tool engineer at IBM, designing systems for validating the performance and robustness of networked storage libraries. From there, he ventured on to work at X-Rite, Inc., developing automated-test equipment for production testing of color measurement instrumentation and then moved on to embedded product development. Greg joined Atomic Object in order to help expand TDD and continuous integration into the embedded realm, where we were told it was impossible. He and his fellow Atoms embarked on a journey to make TDD in the C language a reality. This adventure led to the creation the open-source tools under discussion this evening. These projects are toolsmith creations that utilize the Ruby scripting language to make TDD in C an easily achievable reality. Greg has presented at the Embedded Systems Conferences in both Silicon Valley and Boston, as well at the GLSEC here in Grand Rapids.
Mike Karlesky holds degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He has developed projects such as a DSP-based weather processing system, an automated calibration for temperature sensors, and a QNX-based proof-of-concept target finding platform for the military. Mike holds an interest in applying Agile methods and Test-Driven Development in embedded software and has presented at the GLSEC and ESC conferences on such topics. He is also a contributor to the tools Unity, CMock, and Ceedling that support these practices. He has been involved with several startups and worked as an independent consultant before joining Atomic Object in 2004.
Joe Stump
Who: Joe Stump
When: January 25, 2011
Joe Stump is a Michigan native and an accomplished developer, systems administrator, and founder. Joe worked for several years as the director of IT for eNotes.com. Joe left eNotes to work at social links site Digg.com, where he spent two years as their lead architect.
More recently Joe has co-founded the startup SimpleGeo, which provides location services for other developers.
Joe will be sharing his wide experience on the challenges of building a company, scaling software, and geolocating services to the Software GR group on January 25th. I hope we'll see you there!