Agenda NDC 2009

According to cognitive scientists, we all interpret our surroundings through frames – mental constructs which shape our perspective of the world. Frames place significant limits on our perspective; we can only see what our frames tell us is meaningful and we usually ignore what lies outside the boundaries. Most of us are unaware of the way our background and experience shape the way we frame our decisions and actions; only a few of us consciously adjust our frames as if we were photographers. In fact, we seldom even think about what direction we are pointing our cameras.

At the Norwegian Developers Conference, Mary Poppendieck will survey the eight frames of Lean Software Development, one frame in each session. The sessions will be a chapter–by–chapter summary of Mary and Tom Poppenedieck's new book: Leading Lean Software Development, which will be released in Fall, 2009. Come for any session – or for all of them. Enjoy!

We start with an introduction to lean thinking and it will frame the role of lean leaders.

Level: any level. The session is aimed at team leads, technical leads and managers

Scrum is one of the leading agile software development processes. Over 12,000 project managers have become certified to run Scrum projects. Since its origin on Japanese new product development projects in the 1980s, Scrum has become recognized as one of the best project management frameworks for handling rapidly changing or evolving projects. Especially useful on projects with lots of technology or requirements uncertainty, Scrum is a proven, scalable agile process for managing software projects.

Through lecture, discussion and exercises, this fast–paced tutorial covers the basics of what you need to know to get started with Scrum. You will learn about all key aspects of Scrum including product and sprint backlog, the sprint planning meeting, the sprint review, conducting a sprint retrospective, activities that occur during sprints, measuring and monitoring progress, and scaling Scrum to work with large and distributed teams. Also covered are the roles and responsibilities of the ScrumMaster, the product owner, and the Scrum team.

This session will be equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, product managers and anyone else interested in improving product delivery.

Level: 100

Management decisions regarding structure and policy have profound impact on the speed and quality of value delivery. In this session we examine those that support large–scale agile or lean product development.

Level: any level

Agile software development covers a broad range of practices and ideals, but is often characterised (and even caricatured) in terms of just being a synonym for Extreme Programming or Scrum, or having little concern for architecture. The truth is invariably more subtle, and it is worth examining agility from a different perspective to reveal the shared concerns and common ground. The quality of sustainability is one that can be shared by both software architecture and development process, but is often overlooked.

Too often architecture is neglected by agile projects that go on to struggle. There sometimes appears to be an almost mystical belief that a good architecture will inevitably materialise of its own accord out of daily stand–ups and burndown charts. Process provides a framework for product creation and for people to work within. But a framework is no more than a starting point, and a rolling set of feature requests is not on its own enough to ensure a sustainable product or a sustainable process.

Process and product are invariably intertwined: what you build and the way you build are separable only from an idealised viewpoint. And there is nothing mystical about producing and nurturing a good architecture: it is an intentional act and reflective act, not a magical one. And, like many other good things in life, it involves work.

Windows Azure is an operating system in the cloud – hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides businesses with on–demand hosting, storage and management features in fashion with utility computing. The Azure Services Platform sits on top of Windows Azure – exposing a rich set of infrastructure and application services that developers can leverage within their applications – be they hosted in the cloud or not.

This tutorial will describe the business case for cloud computing and focus on the value proposition of Windows Azure and Azure Services. You will learn how Windows Azure can help businesses scale operations in the cloud, and how developers can build and deploy applications and services to the cloud with familiar development tools. You will also learn about the suite of services within Azure Services including .NET Services, SQL Data Services and Windows Live Services.

The tutorial with explain practical reasons for applications to leverage each of these cloud services, and dive deeper into many of the core services with demonstrations. At the end of this tutorial you will understand the lifecycle for building and deploying applications to the cloud including hosting applications, services and data in the cloud; securing applications with cloud–based identity services; and synchronizing mesh–enabled applications.

Level: 200

This workshop is about developer productivity. It teaches you how to

use Test Driven Development and lean software development to be more

productive in your work while continuously–improving quality and

understanding. You will learn advanced object–oriented techniques in

simple and practicable ways that you will remember and apply at work.

This workshop is not just going to teach you how to write unit tests or

just how to do test–first programing and test automation. It will

show you how to use these techniques properly along side leading

software life cycle methods that transform project groups into lean

software production teams.

Through Test Driven and Behavior Driven Development, you will learn

which design patterns to use and how to use them. You will write code

that is easier to understand and easier to maintain. You will write

acceptance tests that let you generate documentation that helps your

customers become deeply involved with the project, and helps

programmers understand unfamiliar areas of a system with much less

time wasted deciphering code and tests.

Exercises cover unit–testing, mock objects, Test Driven Development,

Behavior Driven Development, object–oriented design principles and

patterns, and domain–specific languages for testing. Participants

will work through testing and design problems individually, with the

instructor, and with the group. Students should bring their own

laptops installed with Visual Studio 2008 as well as the TortoiseSVN

client for Subversion. Tools and materials will be provided on–site

and assistance will be provided to students who need help to setup

their laptops for the workshop.

Next we discuss systems thinking and its critical role in software development.

Level: any level. The session is aimed at team leads, technical leads and managers

The technique of expressing requirements as user stories is one of the most broadly applicable techniques introduced by the agile processes. User stories are an effective approach on all time constrained projects and are a great way to begin introducing a bit of agility to your projects.

In this session, we will look at how to identify and write good user stories. The class will describe the six attributes that good stories should exhibit and present thirteen guidelines for writing better stories. We will explore how user role modeling can help when gathering a project's initial stories.

Because requirements touch all job functions on a development project, this tutorial will be equally suited for analysts, customers, testers, programmers, managers, or anyone involved in a software development project. By the end of this tutorial, you will leave knowing the six attributes of a good story, learn a good format for writing most user stories, learn practical techniques for gathering user stories, know how much work to do up–front and how much to do just–in–time.

Level: 200

Key process and design tips for support an agile architecture and agile architecting.

Level: any level

The practice is of modelling is often associated with heavyweight UML diagrams that are drawn up with the best intentions, but often either leave their readers confounded or are simply left to one side while the other activities in development proceed apace. Modelling has been associated with plan–driven approaches and big up–front analysis and design, at odds with the emphasis of agile approaches. There is, however, another side to modelling that deserves the attention of anyone involved in development, whether they adopt an agile mindset or not.

Modelling is not the preserve of plan–driven methods, and the problem often lies not with modelling per se but with overdosing on models and failing to use modelling as an opportunity for communication. Models that are drawn up by individuals in isolation from one another are often the culprit. Often the secret to effective modelling is more in the –ing than the model.

Windows Azure is an operating system in the cloud – hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides businesses with on–demand hosting, storage and management features in fashion with utility computing. The Azure Services Platform sits on top of Windows Azure – exposing a rich set of infrastructure and application services that developers can leverage within their applications – be they hosted in the cloud or not.

This tutorial will describe the business case for cloud computing and focus on the value proposition of Windows Azure and Azure Services. You will learn how Windows Azure can help businesses scale operations in the cloud, and how developers can build and deploy applications and services to the cloud with familiar development tools. You will also learn about the suite of services within Azure Services including .NET Services, SQL Data Services and Windows Live Services.

The tutorial with explain practical reasons for applications to leverage each of these cloud services, and dive deeper into many of the core services with demonstrations. At the end of this tutorial you will understand the lifecycle for building and deploying applications to the cloud including hosting applications, services and data in the cloud; securing applications with cloud–based identity services; and synchronizing mesh–enabled applications.

Level: 200

This workshop is about developer productivity.  It teaches you how to

use test–driven development and lean software development to be more

productive in your work while continuously–improving quality and

understanding.  You'll learn advanced object–oriented techniques in

simple and practicable ways that you will remember and apply at work.

This workshop isn't just going to teach you how to write unit tests or

just how to do test–first programing and test automation.  It will

show you how to use these techniques properly along side leading

software life cycle methods that transform project groups into lean

software production teams.

Through test–driven and behavior–driven development, you'll learn

which design patterns to use and how to use them.  You'll write code

that is easier to understand and easier to maintain.  You'll write

acceptance tests that let you generate documentation that helps your

customers become deeply involved with the project, and helps

programmers understand unfamiliar areas of a system with much less

time wasted deciphering code and tests.

Exercises cover unit–testing, mock objects, test–driven development,

behavior–driven development, object–oriented design principles and

patterns, and domain–specific languages for testing.  Participants

will work through testing and design problems individually, with the

instructor, and with the group.  Students should bring their own

laptops installed with Visual Studio 2008 as well as the TortoiseSVN

client for Subversion.  Tools and materials will be provided on–site

and assistance will be provided to students who need help to setup

their laptops for the workshop.

We then look at the importance of technical excellence and where it comes from.

Level: any level. The session is aimed at team leads, technical leads and managers

Planning is important, even for agile projects. Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams.

In this session you will learn how to break that cycle by learning and practicing skills that will help create useful plans that lead to reliable decision–making. You will learn about story points, ideal days, and how to estimate with "Planning Poker." Both short–term iteration and long–term release planning will be covered.

This session will be equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, or anyone involved in estimating or planning a project.

Level: 200

Decades ago, Toyota created their original "Toyota Production System House" diagram, that summarized their TPS lean manufacturing system of thought. Now, in the 21st century, this has been updated to their broader Toyota Way for large–scale lean product development, lean service and sales, and the lean enterprise. We explore this new "house."

Level: any level

Not sure about something? And that something affects the detailed design, an architectural decision or choice of functionality? Does that feel like a problem or a part of the solution?

There is a strong tendency for humans to feel unsure about uncertainty, in two minds over ambiguity and a little wobbly with instability. Whether over technology choice, implementation options, requirements or schedule, uncertainty is normally seen as something you must either suppress or avoid. Of this many people appear, well, certain. That you should embrace it and use it to influence schedule, identify risk and inform design is not immediately obvious. A lack of certainty offers the opportunity to highlight risk and reframe questions, making uncertainty part of the solution rather than necessarily a problem.

Windows Azure is an operating system in the cloud – hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides businesses with on–demand hosting, storage and management features in fashion with utility computing. The Azure Services Platform sits on top of Windows Azure – exposing a rich set of infrastructure and application services that developers can leverage within their applications – be they hosted in the cloud or not.

This tutorial will describe the business case for cloud computing and focus on the value proposition of Windows Azure and Azure Services. You will learn how Windows Azure can help businesses scale operations in the cloud, and how developers can build and deploy applications and services to the cloud with familiar development tools. You will also learn about the suite of services within Azure Services including .NET Services, SQL Data Services and Windows Live Services.

The tutorial with explain practical reasons for applications to leverage each of these cloud services, and dive deeper into many of the core services with demonstrations. At the end of this tutorial you will understand the lifecycle for building and deploying applications to the cloud including hosting applications, services and data in the cloud; securing applications with cloud–based identity services; and synchronizing mesh–enabled applications.

Level: 200

This workshop is about developer productivity.  It teaches you how to

use test–driven development and lean software development to be more

productive in your work while continuously–improving quality and

understanding.  You'll learn advanced object–oriented techniques in

simple and practicable ways that you will remember and apply at work.

This workshop isn't just going to teach you how to write unit tests or

just how to do test–first programing and test automation.  It will

show you how to use these techniques properly along side leading

software life cycle methods that transform project groups into lean

software production teams.

Through test–driven and behavior–driven development, you'll learn

which design patterns to use and how to use them.  You'll write code

that is easier to understand and easier to maintain.  You'll write

acceptance tests that let you generate documentation that helps your

customers become deeply involved with the project, and helps

programmers understand unfamiliar areas of a system with much less

time wasted deciphering code and tests.

Exercises cover unit–testing, mock objects, test–driven development,

behavior–driven development, object–oriented design principles and

patterns, and domain–specific languages for testing.  Participants

will work through testing and design problems individually, with the

instructor, and with the group.  Students should bring their own

laptops installed with Visual Studio 2008 as well as the TortoiseSVN

client for Subversion.  Tools and materials will be provided on–site

and assistance will be provided to students who need help to setup

their laptops for the workshop.

Scheduling techniques for delivering reliably are covered in this session.

Level: any level. The session is aimed at team leads, technical leads and managers

Planning is important, even for agile projects. Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams.

In this session you will learn how to break that cycle by learning and practicing skills that will help create useful plans that lead to reliable decision–making. You will learn about story points, ideal days, and how to estimate with "Planning Poker." Both short–term iteration and long–term release planning will be covered.

This session will be equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, or anyone involved in estimating or planning a project.

Level: 300

For some years, Craig's focus has been leading and coaching large, multisite, and offshore agile or lean product development. In this session, we explore experience–based tips for multisite agile development, in which a large–scale development is distributed across multiple cities – usually across multiple countries.

Level: any level

Ideally, code should be sufficient, comprehensible and modifiable, doing the right thing in the right way. In practice, code often falls short of this ideal. Unquestioned habits, misunderstood APIs, wizard–generated code and the inevitable march of time all contribute to an accumulation of accidental complexity that makes current and future work on a code base increasingly difficult and decreasingly agile.

The lessons of Lean Product Development and Lean Manufacturing have been applied to software development process in the large, but the implications of Lean Software Development run deeper, affecting the day–to–day practices around code as well as the style of code itself.

Windows Azure is an operating system in the cloud – hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides businesses with on–demand hosting, storage and management features in fashion with utility computing. The Azure Services Platform sits on top of Windows Azure – exposing a rich set of infrastructure and application services that developers can leverage within their applications – be they hosted in the cloud or not.

This tutorial will describe the business case for cloud computing and focus on the value proposition of Windows Azure and Azure Services. You will learn how Windows Azure can help businesses scale operations in the cloud, and how developers can build and deploy applications and services to the cloud with familiar development tools. You will also learn about the suite of services within Azure Services including .NET Services, SQL Data Services and Windows Live Services.

The tutorial with explain practical reasons for applications to leverage each of these cloud services, and dive deeper into many of the core services with demonstrations. At the end of this tutorial you will understand the lifecycle for building and deploying applications to the cloud including hosting applications, services and data in the cloud; securing applications with cloud–based identity services; and synchronizing mesh–enabled applications.

Level: 200

This workshop is about developer productivity.  It teaches you how to

use test–driven development and lean software development to be more

productive in your work while continuously–improving quality and

understanding.  You'll learn advanced object–oriented techniques in

simple and practicable ways that you will remember and apply at work.

This workshop isn't just going to teach you how to write unit tests or

just how to do test–first programing and test automation.  It will

show you how to use these techniques properly along side leading

software life cycle methods that transform project groups into lean

software production teams.

Through test–driven and behavior–driven development, you'll learn

which design patterns to use and how to use them.  You'll write code

that is easier to understand and easier to maintain.  You'll write

acceptance tests that let you generate documentation that helps your

customers become deeply involved with the project, and helps

programmers understand unfamiliar areas of a system with much less

time wasted deciphering code and tests.

Exercises cover unit–testing, mock objects, test–driven development,

behavior–driven development, object–oriented design principles and

patterns, and domain–specific languages for testing.  Participants

will work through testing and design problems individually, with the

instructor, and with the group.  Students should bring their own

laptops installed with Visual Studio 2008 as well as the TortoiseSVN

client for Subversion.  Tools and materials will be provided on–site

and assistance will be provided to students who need help to setup

their laptops for the workshop.

The nature and essential role of continuous improvement is discussed.

Level: any level. The session is aimed at team leads, technical leads and managers

One of the challenges of agile development is coming to grips with the role of leaders and managers of self–organizing teams. Many would–be ScrumMasters and agile coaches go to the extreme of refusing to exert any influence on their teams at all. Others retain too much of their prior command–and–control management styles and fail to unleash the creativity and productivity of a self–organizing team.

Leading a self–organizing team can be a fine line. In this session you will learn the proper ways to influence the path taken by a team to solving the problems given to it. You will learn how to become comfortable in this role. You will understand why influencing a self–organizing team is neither sneaky nor inappropriate but is necessary.

Drawing on analogies from fields such as evolutionary biology and the study of complex adaptive systems, the instructor will describe three factors necessary for self–organization to occur and then provide seven tools for guiding the direction taken by the team as they self–organize.

Level: 100

Craig's work, over recent years, has been leading and coaching large, multisite, and offshore agile or lean product development, and he has been living in India and China, on and off, since 1978.

In this session, we explore tips for agile "offshore" (which may mean any cheaper developing nation, but usually, in Asia or South America) development that focuses on the dynamics and mindset of collaborating with people in "low–cost" development zones for large–scale agile development.

Level: any level

Use case styles cover a large range of formality, from index–card brevity to multi–page ramble. In most cases use case authors are drawn into writing out step–by–step details that are just as dull to read as they are to write. User stories offer the promise of a conversation.

Conversation, however, is an interaction, not necessarily a product–testable result. The balance between tedious and often incorrect precision and broad but fluffy accuracy, however, is not just one played out in the arena of requirements framing. Tests, from system to unit level, often suffer from a lack of coherence, with the majority of programmers who actually bother to test resorting to a procedural testing style that is difficult to read or reason about.

Finding the right level of detail and the right amount of formality is a perennial challenge in both code and requirements. This session looks at how both perspectives can be viewed in terms of precise but readable propositions backed by concrete examples.

Windows Azure is an operating system in the cloud – hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides businesses with on–demand hosting, storage and management features in fashion with utility computing. The Azure Services Platform sits on top of Windows Azure – exposing a rich set of infrastructure and application services that developers can leverage within their applications – be they hosted in the cloud or not.

This tutorial will describe the business case for cloud computing and focus on the value proposition of Windows Azure and Azure Services. You will learn how Windows Azure can help businesses scale operations in the cloud, and how developers can build and deploy applications and services to the cloud with familiar development tools. You will also learn about the suite of services within Azure Services including .NET Services, SQL Data Services and Windows Live Services.

The tutorial with explain practical reasons for applications to leverage each of these cloud services, and dive deeper into many of the core services with demonstrations. At the end of this tutorial you will understand the lifecycle for building and deploying applications to the cloud including hosting applications, services and data in the cloud; securing applications with cloud–based identity services; and synchronizing mesh–enabled applications.

Level: 200

This workshop is about developer productivity.  It teaches you how to

use test–driven development and lean software development to be more

productive in your work while continuously–improving quality and

understanding.  You'll learn advanced object–oriented techniques in

simple and practicable ways that you will remember and apply at work.

This workshop isn't just going to teach you how to write unit tests or

just how to do test–first programing and test automation.  It will

show you how to use these techniques properly along side leading

software life cycle methods that transform project groups into lean

software production teams.

Through test–driven and behavior–driven development, you'll learn

which design patterns to use and how to use them.  You'll write code

that is easier to understand and easier to maintain.  You'll write

acceptance tests that let you generate documentation that helps your

customers become deeply involved with the project, and helps

programmers understand unfamiliar areas of a system with much less

time wasted deciphering code and tests.

Exercises cover unit–testing, mock objects, test–driven development,

behavior–driven development, object–oriented design principles and

patterns, and domain–specific languages for testing.  Participants

will work through testing and design problems individually, with the

instructor, and with the group.  Students should bring their own

laptops installed with Visual Studio 2008 as well as the TortoiseSVN

client for Subversion.  Tools and materials will be provided on–site

and assistance will be provided to students who need help to setup

their laptops for the workshop.

Then we look into what it takes for an organization to have great people.

Level: any level. The session is aimed at team leads, technical leads and managers

The biggest risk to most projects is building the wrong product. Regardless of how fast your agile team becomes, how brilliant your technical solutions are, or how many automated tests run continuously, nothing matters if you are building the wrong product.

In this session we will look at non–financial ways of both prioritizing product backlog items and choosing among competing project ideas. Included are relative weighting, theme screening, theme scoring, and Kano analysis.

The techniques are easy; the concepts are powerful. You will return home with practical knowledge about how to apply these straight–forward techniques to prioritizing your product backlog.

Level: 200

What is the the foundation of the successful lean enterprise? What are the management behaviors and principles that foster a great value–driven lean–thinking organization? What are the qualities of a true lean–thinking leader? This session explores leading the lean enterprise.

Level: any level

It is implicit in many agile approaches that design is treated as a continuous activity, rather than one exclusive to a single phase of development. From prototyping to Test Driven Development, from architecture envisioning to review, from refactoring to retrospectives, design is treated as a continuous – although sometimes lumpy – process of feedforward and feedback.

On its own, however, this recognition of an unfolding and reactive approach to design does not help developers reason, discuss or envision how a design can grow in response to increasing coverage of scope, new information or other forms of feedback. There sometimes appears to be an air of mysticism surrounding the idea of growing and nurturing design – an unqualified optimism that assumes a leap of faith rather than a more intentional and empirical approach.

There are many valuable aspects of pattern–based thinking that are overlooked in the common perception of design patterns. The original vision of patterns embodies a notion of incremental, feedback–based design – something that may come as a revelation to anyone who had mentally pigeonholed patterns together with heavier–weight design approaches.

This session explores pattern concepts such as pattern stories and pattern languages with a view to helping agile developers reason about their designs.

Windows Azure is an operating system in the cloud – hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides businesses with on–demand hosting, storage and management features in fashion with utility computing. The Azure Services Platform sits on top of Windows Azure – exposing a rich set of infrastructure and application services that developers can leverage within their applications – be they hosted in the cloud or not.

This tutorial will describe the business case for cloud computing and focus on the value proposition of Windows Azure and Azure Services. You will learn how Windows Azure can help businesses scale operations in the cloud, and how developers can build and deploy applications and services to the cloud with familiar development tools. You will also learn about the suite of services within Azure Services including .NET Services, SQL Data Services and Windows Live Services.

The tutorial with explain practical reasons for applications to leverage each of these cloud services, and dive deeper into many of the core services with demonstrations. At the end of this tutorial you will understand the lifecycle for building and deploying applications to the cloud including hosting applications, services and data in the cloud; securing applications with cloud–based identity services; and synchronizing mesh–enabled applications.

Level: 200

This workshop is about developer productivity.  It teaches you how to

use test–driven development and lean software development to be more

productive in your work while continuously–improving quality and

understanding.  You'll learn advanced object–oriented techniques in

simple and practicable ways that you will remember and apply at work.

This workshop isn't just going to teach you how to write unit tests or

just how to do test–first programing and test automation.  It will

show you how to use these techniques properly along side leading

software life cycle methods that transform project groups into lean

software production teams.

Through test–driven and behavior–driven development, you'll learn

which design patterns to use and how to use them.  You'll write code

that is easier to understand and easier to maintain.  You'll write

acceptance tests that let you generate documentation that helps your

customers become deeply involved with the project, and helps

programmers understand unfamiliar areas of a system with much less

time wasted deciphering code and tests.

Exercises cover unit–testing, mock objects, test–driven development,

behavior–driven development, object–oriented design principles and

patterns, and domain–specific languages for testing.  Participants

will work through testing and design problems individually, with the

instructor, and with the group.  Students should bring their own

laptops installed with Visual Studio 2008 as well as the TortoiseSVN

client for Subversion.  Tools and materials will be provided on–site

and assistance will be provided to students who need help to setup

their laptops for the workshop.