The conference venue is the Karen Gail Miller Conference Center, 9750 South 300 West, Sandy UT. Basically you get off I-15 at 90th South (if coming from the north) or 106th South (if coming from the south), then get on the frontage road on the west side of I-15.
Conference sessions start at 9:00 am on Monday and Tuesday. Check-in opens at 8:00.
Here’s a Google Map showing the conference location, the Monday evening social location, and the host hotel: http://tinyurl.com/agilerootsmap
There is some construction in the area, but no road closures that I know of that will impact us. Please comment if you know of any relevant road closures.
June 8, 2009 by Nate Jones
David Broschinsky, Founder, Usable Patterns, Salt Lake City, UT
Personas are no substitute for talking directly to customers, but what do you do when the customer isn’t there to talk to? Learn how to create a persona that helps you keep the customer in mind while developing your product. Tell user stories with confidence because the information is there to back the story up.
About David
Dave has 17 years of experience designing usable applications across a wide variety of industries. Dave’s focus is to increase the usability of any application, including web, through ethnographic research, heuristic evaluations, and rapid paper prototyping. Dave was first introduced to Agile techniques in 2002 and has been incorporating Agile methodologies with User Experience ever since.
Alex Pukinskis, Rally Software, Boulder, Colorado
These days, it seems like every software company has some agile or agile-ish teams. But how do you carry agile values beyond the team and into the business prioritization process? Over the last few years, I’ve worked with a group of stakeholders from VPs to support representatives to form a Product Council team that guides our development process. We ship software frequently (every week) and so this process is key for keeping a large number of stakeholders engaged in close contact with the delivery team.
The Product Council consolidates feedback, develops the roadmap, and maintains stakeholder buy-in for a continuously evolving plan. In this workshop, i’ll introduce two different Product Council structures and the pros and cons of each. We’ll also talk about voting methods, managing ‘persistent’ stakeholders, using lightweight business cases to avoid waste, and whether your Product Council should be a democracy or an advisory team.
About Alex
Alex Pukinskis has helped over 30 software teams transition to Agile development since giving XP a try in 2001. He has worked as an agile coach through Rally, ThoughtWorks, and as an independent, helping organizations of all sizes succeed with Agile. Prior to coaching, Alex was developer and manager of software teams. Alex is a regular presenter at conferences, including Agile, SD Best Practices, and Better Software. He is a Certified ScrumMaster Practitioner, and holds a B.A. from the University of Connecticut. Alex currently works as a product owner for Rally Software in Boulder, Colorado.
June 8, 2009 by Nate Jones
Jonathan House, Technology Director for Amirsys, Salt Lake City, UT
Interesting things happen when you put the words “Agile” and “Architecture” in the same sentence. Some would say that they have nothing to do with each other, others would say that effectiveness in one precludes effectiveness in the other. Still others would say “look, a squirrel”, but we’re not going to worry about them right now.
Rather than wander aimlessly through the vast domains of knowledge that both agile and software architecture imply, the goal of this session is to distill each down to a level where we can observe first-hand the impact that architectural decisions have on our ability to iteratively develop software over time, and vice versa. We will accomplish this by using an iterative exercise as a framework to construct and evolve a generalized application architecture.
Persons attending this session need not be either Agile or Architecture experts, but an interest in both is an absolute requirement. Ideally attendees will be familiar with the common abstractions of complex software applications such as user interfaces, business logic, communication protocols, API’s, frameworks, persistence mechanisms and so forth, but if you are not, we’ll be sure to group you with someone who is so you won’t miss the fun.
At the end of this session attendees should walk out with not one, but two shiny new skills – first is an increased knowledge of both the cost of investment and the price of change at various layers of application architecture. Second is a new sense of “smell” that will help you to detect when an architectural investment is needed, or when too much has been or is being invested.
About Jonathan
At the tender age of 14 Jonathan engaged in his very first “software for hire” contract, for his father who needed a TRS-80 Basic program converted into an Apple II floating point Basic program. This was immediately followed by his first experience dealing with an impossible customer, and being grounded for a month.
Over a career of darn near three decades Jonathan has been at various times a software tester, business analyst, clueless user, project manager, product manager, architect, programmer, and pointy haired boss.
Watching the same mistakes made over and over again in the industry drove him to look for better ways to make software that works, with the result that he now can be found lurking around both the Agile and software architecture communities, generally finding ways to make a nuisance of himself.
Jonathan is currently the Technology Director for Amirsys, a medical informatics company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. As a long-time devotee of Alistair Cockburn’s Crystal family of methodologies, Jonathan has successfully turned Amirsys into a Crystal “crash test” facility while at the same time continuing to deliver software that works and generates revenue with unreasonably small development teams.
Jonathan is also a Cockburn Associate and Certified Crystal Practitioner (and has the hat to prove it), a Certified Scrum Master, long time active member of the Salt Lake Agile Roundtable, and if the stories can be believed, quite possibly the world’s first Agile Sadist.
June 8, 2009 by Nate Jones
Andrew Shafer, Reductive Labs, Salt Lake City, UT
The starting point of all Agile engineering practices is reproducibly building from source code. If software is delivered on servers, and those servers can’t be reproducibly deployed from bare metal to running services, how Agile can you be? The definition of ‘shipping’ software has changed dramatically in the last decade. In a world where a server is an API call, new tools and technologies can be leveraged to optimize processes where infrastructure is code and deploying software is on demand. These tools can be used to implement dynamic scaling, on demand test environments and disaster recovery. Continuous integration is great, but get ready for continuous delivery…
About Andrew
Andrew Shafer is a partner at Reductive Labs where he develops and evangelizes Puppet, the open source system automation framework. Since 2004, he has been a regular participant in the Salt Lake City Agile Roundtable and a team member or manager in an Agile setting. Andrew has a background in computational science, embedded Linux, database administration, web frameworks, and operations. His new hobby is helping organize events like Agile Roots and Ignite Salt Lake. Follow Andrew at twitter.com/littleidea.
