Founder and CEO Dave Thomas, Bedarra Research Labs

Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, professor, consultant, architect, executive and investor. Dave is founder and CEO of Bedarra Corporation; which provides virtual CTO and CEO, business mentoring and seed investment to emerging companies. Recently formed Bedarra Research Labs undertakes speculative research on applications of emerging software technologies.

He has many years of experience in structured documents including the design of laser printer controllers, early commercial applications of Tex. He has advised on the IBM B2B strategy, and is on the MS Customer Advisory Council and with OLL contributed to the SCORM elearning standard, and authoring tools. He is Chairman of Xia Systems, Online-Learning.com (OLL), and a director of Stilo/Omnimark, Bitflash, Amikanow and Synop and several other software companies.

Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO and president of Object Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs) and led the commercial introduction of object and component technology. The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technology company.

He was also the principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAge Smalltalk and Java tools and virtual machines including the initial work on popular multi-language Eclipse.org IDE. OTI pioneered the use of virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping the first commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in the establishment of IBM's Pervasive computing efforts and in particular the Java tooling.

Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University, and the University Of Queensland and is widely published in the software engineering literature. He is a popular humorous albeit opinionated keynote speaker. Dave remains active in various roles within the technical community including ECOOP, AOSD, Evolve, and Agile Development Conference, Agile/XP Universe and OOPSLA Onward. He is a founding director of the Agile Alliance and most recently a founder of Open Augment Consortium. Dave writes expert columns in Otland Online in Germany, and the Journal Of Object Technology in Switzerland where he also serves on the editorial board.

Presentation: "Cloud Panel Discussion"

Track: Cloud

Time: Monday 15:40 - 16:30

Location: Lille Sal

Abstract: The premise is simple. In the future, we won't have or even need all our data or software programs on our own computers -- they'll be floating around somewhere on somebody else's servers, accessible via the internet. A vast, interconnected "nebula" of other people's data and servers, aka the "Cloud". Is this Web 3.0, SOA 2.0, something entirely different, or the same old stuff once again repackaged by the marketing department? Listen to our industry experts' views and opinions (they are sure to have many!) as they debate what it means to live in the cloud. Conferences are all about interaction, so please come and interact with us by posing questions to the panel.

Presentation: "Lean and Agile In the Large - Principles, Practices and Experiences for Large Scale Software Development"

Track: Scaling Agility

Time: Wednesday 15:40 - 16:30

Location: Kammermusik

Abstract: Lean and Agile practices have made a major positive impact on productivity and quality of life for individuals and development teams. In this presentation we focus on the challenges and practices of using Lean and Agile in large development organizations. We introduce new practices in Envisioning, Definition, Planning and Release Management and Measurement which compliment the Agile practices used for Development. These practices allow business to gain agility while addressing their needs for governance and quality. They integrate Lean and Agile software with best practice Lean Product Engineering practices while respecting and encouraging the wide adoption of empowering agile practices. The practices provide proven practical techniques for large scale Agile challenges such as Voice of The Customer: Tangible Requirements and Acceptance Testing; Role of Architecture, Models and Components, Management of Features vs. Components: Planning, Estimating and Resource Allocation: Dependency Management and Release Management; Scrum of Scrums and Communities of Practice, and Enterprise Development Dashboards and CMM Compliance