Summary
It is possible to measure certain properties of code, and on the one hand, correlate them with project factors known to have economic merit and on the other, with programmer-pleasing practices. This session surveys emerging evidence that we can measure the effect of the technical practices of Agile development, and explores what we might be able to do about it to our benefit.

Bio
Keith Braithwaite is a Principle Consultant with Zuhlke Engineering, and leads their Center for Agile Practice in London. He provides Agile training, consultancy and mentoring to development teams in the wholesale finance and mobile telecoms industries.

About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community. QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

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Summary
In this presentation held during Agile 2008, Alan Shalloway, CEO and founder of Net Objectives, presents the Lean software development principles and practices and how they can benefit to Agile practitioners.

Bio
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. He is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design.

About the conference
Agile 2008 is an exciting international industry conference that presents the latest techniques, technologies, attitudes and first-hand experience, from both a management and development perspective, for successful Agile software development.

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Summary
Choosing the right features can make the difference between the success and failure of a software product. Mike Cohn presented 'Prioritizing your Project Backlog' at Agile 2008 on how a project backlog should be organized and prioritized and non-financial techniques for prioritization such as kano analysis, theme screening/scoring, relative weighting and analytic hierarchy process.

Bio
Mike Cohn is the Author of 'Agile Estimating and Planning' and 'User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development', the founder of Mountain Goat Software -- a process and project management consultancy with international training in agile methods and scrum -- a blogger, and a founding member of the Agile Alliance.

About the conference
Agile 2008 is an exciting international industry conference that presents the latest techniques, technologies, attitudes and first-hand experience, from both a management and development perspective, for successful Agile software development.

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Summary
David Anderson talks about the history of Agile, the current status of it and his vision for the future. The role of Agile does not stand in just having a practice, but in finding ways to implement the principles contained by the Agile Manifesto.

Bio
David Anderson is the author of "Agile Management for Software Engineering", a signatory of the PM Declaration of Interdependence and a founder of the APLN, an original member of the "Singapore Project" where Feature Driven Development emerged.

About the conference
Agile 2008 is an exciting international industry conference that presents the latest techniques, technologies, attitudes and first-hand experience, from both a management and development perspective, for successful Agile software development.

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Summary
Agile methods are empirical: plan, do, evaluate how it went, plan the next thing. When these cycles are very short, learning happens quickly and teams can move into high-performance mode. But discipline is necessary - planning must happen continuously to feed the fast-moving team. For 80 minutes David Hussman looks at the Agile practices around planning a project, a release, and an iteration.

Bio
David Hussman has mentored and coached agile teams all over the world for the past five years. Software developer in a variety of domains from digital biometrics to education, leader at workshops and speaker at conferences, he has contributed to several books ("Managing Agile Projects" and "Agile in the Large") and is the co-owner of SGF Software which helps companies transition to Agile.

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Summary
In a 60-minute JAOO 2005 talk, Scrum creator Dr. Jeff Sutherland covers the history of Scrum from its inception thru his participation with Ken Schwaber in rolling out Scrum to industry, to its impact at Easel, Fuji-Xerox, Honda, WildCard, Lexus, Google. He looks at Scrum types A, B and "all at once" type C, and confirms the humorous rumour that Kent Beck "stole" Scrum practices when creating XP.

Bio
Dr. Jeff Sutherland has been VP/CTO of 9 software product companies, most recently PatientKeeper, a top vendor in the mobile/wireless healthcare market. He is an Agile Manifesto signatory and a Certified Scrum Trainer. In 1993 he ran the first Scrum at Easel, and has been a Scrum consultant to Microsoft, Yahoo, Ariba, Cadence, Adobe, GE Healthcare, and M3 Media Services. www.jeffsutherland.com

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Summary
Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber spoke at Agile2006 on code quality as a corporate asset. InfoQ presents video of his talk, The Canary in the Coalmine. Schwaber discussed how a degrading core codebase paralyses a team and negates any Agility gained through process improvement. He proposed strategies for management to identify, track and stop this downward spiral.

Bio
Ken Schwaber (www.controlchaos.com) codeveloped Scrum with Jeff Sutherland in the early 1990s. A 30-year IT veteran and an Agile Manifesto signatory, he subsequently founded the AgileAlliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to training and supporting Scrum practitioners.

About the conference

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Summary
Ron Jeffries' upcoming book looks at how tracking "Running Tested Features" is the essential element of Agility, from which all other practices and activities necessarily follow. Deborah Hartmann interviews Ron who takes to the whiteboard to explain how, when supported by XP's "simple design" practice, RTF helps teams deliver consistently without building up costly technical debt.

Bio
Ron Jeffries, an independent consultant in XP and Agile methods (www.XProgramming.com) has been developing software longer than most people have been alive. Ron was the on-site coach for the original XP project, authored Extreme Programming Adventures in C#, and Extreme Programming Installed, and co-created Object Mentor's popular XP Immersion course.

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Summary
InfoQ editor Obie Fernandez asks David some hard-hitting questions about the future of Rails in the enterprise, profiting from his success and whether a vendor will fork Rails someday. Contains lots of good information for technologists staking their future on the Rails platform, including David's opinions on Rails adoption, service-oriented architecture and scaling Rails applications.

Bio
David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a powerful open-source framework for using the programming language Ruby. As a partner at 37signals in Chicago, Hansson created Ruby on Rails to write software for their popular project-management tools like Basecamp and Backpack. He is a big proponent of opinionated software and getting real.

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Summary
Lean software gurus Mary and Tom Poppendieck share their years of practical experience, as they speak on the history of Lean thinking, the value of fast delivery and deferred committment, their use of Value Stream Mapping to identify and reduce waste, the importance of identifying and dealing well with cross-organizational and inter-organizational boundaries, and how Lean relates to RUP and Scrum.

Bio
Mary and Tom Poppendieck www.poppendieck.com teach and consult worldwide on Lean principles for software. Their practical, customer-focused approach to software development identifies real business value and enables product teams to realize that value. Mary has managed solutions for both operations and new product development. Tom is an enterprise analyst, architect, and agile process mentor.

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Summary
Last year Agile coach Alexia Bowers walked a mile in a project customer's shoes, and told us how it felt in this Agile2006 Leadership Summit presentation. She stressed the need to strive for creative solutions instead of simply cutting scope.

Bio
Alexia "Lex" Bowers co-founded Ternary Software, spearheading its initial adoption of Scrum and XP. As an Agile PM and practitioner she helps teams understand WHY the practices work while working with them, hands on. Lex holds Masters degrees in Software Eng. and in Cognitive and Neural Psych., and is fluent in models of personality type, team dynamics, and organizational theory.

About the conference
The Agile Alliance organizes an annual international Agile conference, which brings together the key people in the Agile space to talk about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management and development sides of Agile software development.

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Summary
Here is a story about Agile's use in a governmental organisation: at the 2006 APLN Leadership Summit Mark Salamango and John Cunningham looked at the problems and opportunities of introducing Agile in Army environments. True Agile practices cannot be 'commanded' or 'directed’ but frequent delivery offers Agile leaders a "soft" kind of power that is, in fact, very effective.

Bio
John Cunningham leads Band XI International, a small, agile firm that combines embedded Java and Ruby/Rails to deliver innovative solutions to defense, health care, and other industries http://www.bandxi.com. Mark Salamango, formerly the Chief Pervasive Architect for the Army, continues his Agile work for www.BOSSDev.com as the Product Manager for Spinscape™.

About the conference
The Agile Alliance organizes an annual international Agile conference, which brings together the key people in the Agile space to talk about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management and development sides of Agile software development.

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Summary
Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas, author of the 'pickaxe book' Programming Ruby, and co-author of Agile Web Development with Rails and The Pragmatic Programmer, found some time to talk with InfoQ about Ruby, Rails and the importance of choosing the right tool for the job.

Bio
Dave Thomas is recognized internationally as an expert who develops high-quality software--accurate and highly flexible systems. He helped write the now-famous Agile Manifesto, and regularly speak on new ways of producing software. He is the author of six books, including the best selling The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide.

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