Alan Shalloway, Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Business Case For Agility: The Lean Agile Connection

Agile Denver will be meeting on Tuesday, October 16 at the PPA Event Center located near Downtown Denver and I-25. Please see below for further details. We will host guest speaker Alan Shalloway, founder and CEO of Net Objectives.

Agile Methods are now the next big thing. As well they should be. Agile methods enable a team to be more productive, write higher quality code and give better visibility to management about how things are going. With all of this going for it, you may not need a business case for agility. Fortunately, there is a strong one. It comes from the principles of Lean Software Development.

Lean Software Development is essentially applying the principles of Lean Manufacturing and Lean Product Development in the Software Development World. Mary and Tom Poppendieck put forth 7 principles of lean software development in their seminal text: Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers. These 7 principles are:

1. optimize the whole
2. eliminate waste
3. build quality in
4. deliver fast
5. defer commitment
6. create knowledge
7. respect people

One of the underlying principles of Lean is to add value to the customer quickly. Agile methods have the capacity to do that. This seminar starts off with explaining how delivering 80% of the value of a system can often be done in 20% of the time – and why you should do that if you can.

The seminar starts by presenting five reasons for Agile development:

1. Adding value quickly to the customer
2. Getting clarity on customer needs
3. Increasing visibility of project progress to management
4. Assisting the team in transitioning to Agile methods
5. Writing the code with better quality

The seminar continues by showing how the principles of Lean Software Development create an effective environment for developing software in stages. It also discusses how software development is mostly like product development and how the lean principles support this. The seminar concludes by showing how Lean principles can guide product portfolio management to increase productivity while ensuring the enterprise is working on the most useful products.

The target audience for this talk includes management, business analysts, team leads, and architects, as well as developers and QA professionals.

As always, our monthly meetings are open to the public and there is no cost to attend.

Speaker

Alan Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With almost 40 years of experience, Alan is an industry thought leader, trainer and coach in the areas of Lean Software Development, The Lean-Agile Connection and using Design Patterns in agile environments. Alan has developed training and coaching methods for Lean-Agile that have helped his clients achieve long-term, sustainable productivity gains using the methods. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide as well as a trainer/coach. He is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design and is currently writing Lean Anti-Patterns and What to do About Them. He is a CSM Trainer and has a Masters in Computer Science from M.I.T.

Location

The October 2007 meeting will be held at the PPA Event Center. See our faq for more information.

Sponsor

Net Objectives' vision is to help you achieve effective software development without suffering. Net Objectives assists companies in maximizing the business value returned from their efforts in software development and maintenance. They do this by providing quality training, coaching, and consulting that both directly assists and empowers you to create and sustain this ability.