Agile Mindset

When: 8 April 2010, 6PM

Venue: Allan Gray Portswood office in the Presentation Room on the third floor. You can download a map here. Everyone parking in the Portswood parking area will have to pay for their own parking tickets. There is also parking available in Beach road.

Cost: Free

Sign up for this exciting event here.

Topic: Software Development Practices with an Agile mindset - Toe dipping at human speed

Slides: Development Practices

Marius de Beer will introduce Agile software development practices that teams can adopt without exceeding the rate at which they, and their management, can change.  These practices have been cherry picked as a low barrier start to a life long journey of honing our skill in meeting the demands of iterative- incremental- software delivery.

None of these practices are new, yet they are far less mainstream than their management counterparts.  The lack of adoption is caused by one part bad Public Relations (PR) and two parts panic. Panic is easily explained; Extreme Programming (XP) is the de facto remedy when development teams have to take a feature from “story” to “release ready” in two weeks.  Test Driven Development and Pair Programming are the only two practices in XP that have received significant airtime.  Both these practices cause developers to assume the fetal position and cry “mommy”. Bad PR is slightly more complex.  There has never been a business model around XP, which means no one took the time to explain it to executives that approve spending, and by extention, initiatives.

This talk will empower managers and developers to implement software development practices with an Agile mindset without fear or trepidation.

Aslam Khan from Factor10 and Roderick Lim Banda from KASE will join Marius for a panel Q&A session after the talk.

About the Speaker
Marius’ interest in software systems started at an early age and he has been “living the life of software” ever since.  After qualifying as a Mechanical Engineer in 1991 he focused on the design of mechanical systems with electronic controls.  In 1996 his transition to pure software systems development was complete. Since then Marius has been involved in most of the dominant software technologies and environments, from high availability back-end systems handling thousands of transactions per second, to small embedded systems running mission critical software with minimal memory and processing power. From 2002 Marius has been an avid practitioner of Agile Engineering Practices and as technical lead and mentor has help more than 10 teams adopt these practices. In 2008 he also started coaching in Agile Management Practices and completed an Agile Apprenticeship in the USA and Canada which included his Scrum Master Certification with Ken Schwaber. Marius has mentored teams in implementing Scrum and Kanban.

This event’s catering is kindly sponsored by Intec

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