Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World

Catch this Webcast Live on Two Dates
Broadcast Date (For North American Attendees): Wednesday, January 20, 2009
Time: 11:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM CT / 2:00 PM ET 
Broadcast Date (For International Attendees): Thursday, January 21, 2009
Time: 7:00 AM PT / 9:00 AM CT / 10:00 AM ET / 5:00 PM GMT
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Dr. Ahmed Sidky, Dr. Agile
Matt Klassen, Strategic Solutions Manager, MKS Inc.
Bob Aiello, Editor-in-Chief, CM Crossroads

Taking a "purist", big bang approach to Agile is not a viable option for most development organizations, especially large enterprises. The most successful deployments of Agile are tailored to the context, strengths and limitations of the organization and are transformations over time, not overnight implementations. The challenge becomes defining a process that minimizes risk and takes an iterative approach to Agile migration, allowing acclimation to Agile principles while accounting for the constraints of Agile 'in the real world'.

Build Smarter, Not Harder: an Agile Developer’s Guide to Build Avoidance

Broadcast Date: On Demand
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Scott Castle, Senior Product Manager, Electric Cloud
Bob Aiello, Editor-in-Chief, CM Journal

Agile developers know that a quick build is a necessity to maintain short development cycles.  Two basic strategies for short builds exist: build acceleration, where the same amount of work is run on more resources, getting it done faster; and build avoidance, where less actual work is done but the same end results are achieved.  Some examples of build avoidance are complex and exotic, such as the object reuse techniques of ccache and clearmake winkin; others are simple and well-known, like building incrementally.  None of these techniques gets build avoidance entirely right because each lacks knowledge about what you need.  In this webinar we’ll cover a new approach to build avoidance, called subbuilds, which has better performance across the broadest class of scenarios.  We’ll introduce the concept, describe how it works in practice, and provide you with an implementation that you can start using right now.

A New Kind of Engineering

Broadcast Date: Thursday, November 19, 2009
Time: 10:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM CT / 1:00 PM ET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Usman Muzaffar, V.P. Product Management, Electric Cloud
Patrick Egan, Founder, CM Crossroads

As software system complexity increases, so necessarily does the production infrastructure responsible for build, test, release, deploy. What is the future of this trend? This engaging talk explores the evolution of the relationship between complex projects and their supporting systems across other industries. Using history as a guide to the future, it considers the creation of a distinct new engineering discipline -- software production engineering -- with new tools, methodologies, and people specifically targeting the unique challenges of this space.

Three Simple Things that Will Help You Adopt Agile in Your Enterprise

Broadcast Date: Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Time: 10:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM CT / 1:00 PM ET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
John Scumniotales, The First Scrummaster
Jeff McKenna, The First Scrum Coach
Patrick Egan, Publisher, Agile Journal

Adopting Agile can be challenging, a simple search of the web will lead you to many articles about those challenges. What you really need to know are the simple and effective things you can do to help you succeed with rolling out Agile. 

In this webinar, two of the original Scrum practitioners, will give you their tried and tested strategies for deploying agile successfully in complex organizations. Not only were John and Jeff there at the beginning of Scrum, since then they have amassed a career's worth of experience implementing agile in progressively more challenging organizations. Get practical advice from the front line of Scrum and Agile enterprise practitioners on what works and what doesn't for Agile in the Enterprise.

Customer speak: Teams, Insights, Results with Quality Driven Software

Broadcast Date: Thursday, September 24, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM PT / 2:00 PM CT / 3:00 PM ET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Colleen Meads, Test Manager, Accident Compensation Corporation
Michael Lundblad, Program Manager, IBM Software
Patrick Egan, Founder, CM Crossroads

Managing software delivery risk in a changing environment is a difficult challenge and implementing a strategy for a software lifecycle approach to quality management aligned to business objectives and outcomes seem as daunting. However, to drive innovation and differentiation, successful organizations are realizing that a software lifecycle approach supported by repeatable processes, integrated tooling, data and metrics is critical to ensure greater quality and achieve greater value from their investments in software. 

Build & Deployment Automation for the Lean Economy

Speakers:
Jeffrey Fredrick, Technical Evangelist, Urbancode, Inc.
Eric Minick, Lead Consultant, Urbancode, Inc.
Patrick Egan, Founder, CM Crossroads

In good economic times teams attempt bold experiments that promise to take them to new heights of productivity. In lean times like these few have the appetite for such speculative ventures. Any new investment needs to address immediate pain and show immediate payback. But the pace of demands hasn’t slowed and the ever increasing need to do more continues. For build and release teams the demands come from all directions. The shorter cycle times of Agile means more builds, more deployments and more releases. The adoption of SOA means more complexity, more elements to juggle. The move to global round-the-clock 24-hr development means more teams to service and less downtime. And in this economy adding headcount is likely not an option, instead you’re told to get Lean and Mean. But how do you get to Lean and Mean without being stretched too thin?