Dave Thomas, Father of OTI, CEO of Bedarra Corporation

Dave Thomas

Biography: Dave Thomas

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.

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.

Software Passion: The Joy of Building Great Software Together

Links:
Personal website: davethomas.net
eclipse.org
agilealliance.org

Presentation: "Career.You - Build the Career You Want"

Track: AGILE CASE STUDIES / Time: Tuesday 14:45 - 15:45 / Location: Rytmisk Sal, Musikhuset

Careers seldom just happen!  They are emergent and strongly shaped by you as Product Owner of Career.You. Careers require constant refactoring and enhancement. Career Development is an investment in self understanding, in collaboration with others and in quickly accessing opportunities which present themselves. We discuss career patterns an anti-patterns based on our own career experiences. Attendees will leave with simple tools to become more proactive product owners of their own careers and/or mentors for others.

Keywords: Management, Lean, Career, People, Development, Envisioning ...

Target audience: Software professionals who want to have an interesting and rewarding career

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

Track: TRAINING: AGILE FRIDAY / Time: Friday 13:00 - 16:00 / Location: Trifork 1

Lean and Agile practices have made a major positive impact on productivity and quality of life for individuals and development teams.

In this tutorial we focus on the challenges and practices of using Lean and Agile in large development organizations. Large scale software is typically built and maintained by large numbers of geographically distributed developers, uses multiple technologies and tool chains, often building a family of products using one or more platforms.  Large scale software must respond to the business need to commit to delivery functionality and dates months ahead. Throughout the tutorial we call on examples from large global organizations that have made the transition to Lean and Agile Development.  The small group format of the tutorial encourages participants to discuss their specific challenges.

We introduce new practices in Envisioning, Definition, Planning and Release Engineering (End Game) which compliment the Agile practices used for Development. These practices allow business to gain agility while addressing their needs for on time delivery and governance. We discuss how to integrate best practices Lean Product Engineering 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. We describe the necessary organization structures, roles, artifacts and tooling needed to streamline large scale software construction.
 
Keywords: Transition, Large Scale, Enterprise Agile, Agile, Lean, Organization Change, Project Management, Process Management, Enterprise Scrum, Lean
Software, Agile Architecture, Agile Design, Metrics, Peopleware

Target Audience: Technical and Business Leaders; IT and Software Executives;, Project, Program and Product Managers/Directors; Agile Coaches, Change Managers, QA Managers/Directors; who are interested in knowing how to implement Lean and Agile in Large Organizations.