Monday June 19

AOSTA – Agile Open Source Tools Academy
Werner Wild, Evolution Consulting, University of Innsbruck, Management Center Innsbruck
Barbara Weber, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Hubert Baumeister, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby

Our workshop provides a platform to share experiences, exchange success stories and discuss potential pitfalls when using Open Source Tools (OST) for Agile Development. The goal of this workshop is to create awareness of useful OST and help to improve one’s portfolio of tools for Agile Development.
Everyone who already uses or plans to use OST for developing software the Agile Way can participate. All, from hard core developers via project managers to CIOs are welcome to share their experiences and expectations. In addition, OST developers should attend to gain additional insights in their “customer’s” agile needs and want to better steer their ongoing open source projects. Finally, whoever wants to get a quick overview on the state of the art in OST for Agile Development can participate in the discussions and/or demos; however, we kindly ask participants to get ready to demo, or at least share some stories about their favourite tool(s). Bring your Laptop !

To get started a comprehensive overview on OST is given by the organizers when presenting the results of two Master Thesis (e.g. Value Benefit Analysis) at the MCI (Management Center Innsbruck). After this brief introduction workshop participants should present a short summary of their agile open source toolbox, including the pros and cons they find noteworthy. Then, like in an Open Space, “workshoppers” should demo their agile toolkit, or, at least, their favourite OST at given timeslots. Short “hands on” sessions would be great, if there are the “right” number of participants at each spot in the Open Space. Finally, a wrap up session with all participants will give a chance to discuss open questions, share “war stories” and get feedback.

This workshop provides participants with the unique opportunity to profit from the experience of real practitioners using OST in their current projects and, equally important, to leave with the gratifying feeling of having been able to help others with your expertise. Participants will gain a quick perspective whether a specific tool can ease their daily work and learn how to avoid well know and not-so-well-known pitfalls.

A comprehensive list of OST for Agile Warriors will be created as one of the publicly available outputs from this workshop, it will be made available on the web. However, physically present, active participants will learn the most, e.g., through the shared stories and networking opportunities. And, last but not least, you will be able to spend a fun and nice morning with great people like you !

Biography:

Werner Wild has been in IT for almost 30 years and currently is a consultant with Evolution, Innsbruck. He also lectures at the University of Innsbruck, the University of Bolzano and the Management Center Innsbruck (MCI). He has long term experience with many practices of XP as a developer, project manager and consultant and tries hard to convince his students to become more agile !

Barbara Weber is a full-time researcher at the Computer Science Department, University of Innsbruck, Austria and specializes in Business Process Management/Business Agility. She has given lectures in Agile Methods for several years and managed numerous XP projects with graduate students. Her development projects are almost exclusively done with Open Source tools.

Hubert Baumeister is associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, and is one of the few people who has been attending all (!) XP 2000-2005 conferences! In addition, he served as Program Chair of XP 2005 and as Academic Chair of XP 2004.
 

 Introducing Agile Concepts into “Traditional” Environments
 Scott Duncan, The Westfall Team, sduncan@computer.org or scott.duncan@gmail.com

This half-day workshop is intended to address how to present agile concepts to people unfamiliar with any specific agile method, but who follow some process, probably based on waterfall concepts (possibly with iteration). The goal of the workshop is to develop “recommendations” for how to present agile concepts in ways that allow people in an organization to adopt them, perhaps bit-by-bit, without feeling, or making the organization feel, like some big change has to take place or some specific method has to be committed to right away. At the very least, participants will share their experiences introducing agile concepts in ways that allow them to use one another’s ideas back in their own environments.

It will be desirable that attendees have some experience (not necessarily successful) trying to introduce agile concepts into their (or someone else’s) environment. They do not have to have tried to bring in a full-blown, named method. The key is how they explained and tried to adopt/adapt agile principles and values to an environment employing other methods/approaches. Attendees, whether they have such experience or not, are encouraged to bring a written “position” paper with them (200-250 words) which will be collected as part of the workshop materials. Possible topic areas for such papers would include (but not be limited to) the following:

Change Management
Communication
Contracts
Delivery (frequent iterations)
Design (refactoring)
Documentation
Legacy Systems (enhancement and testing)
Planning
Process and Assessment
Requirements
Roles
Scaling Up
Verification & Validation

After the conference the results will be written and “published” in some way, including seeing how the material might apply to the IEEE standard. Some material may also be included as a part of a companion book on the IEEE standard for the IEEE Computer Society Press. (Such a book can have a lot of ideas, advice, experiences, etc. in it not appropriate to a more terse standard but useful for those looking to implement the standard in an effective manner.)

About the Workshop Leader:
Scott Duncan has been involved in commercial and government software development since 1972. For the last 12 years he has been an internal/external consultant and trainer in software quality and process engineering. He is a member of the IEEE-CS, ACM, and ASQ. He is Standards and Web Chair for ASQ's Software Division, and the Division's representative to the U.S. Technical Advisory Group for ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 and to the Executive Committee and Management Board of IEEE’s Software and Systems Engineering Standards Committee. He is also Working Group Chair of IEEE 1648 (agile methods) and IEEE 90003 (IEEE adoption of ISO 90003).
 

Description
This workshop will continue the success of last year in investigating the application of Domain Specific Languages within Agile development. A Domain Specific Language (DSL) is designed to express the requirements and solutions of a particular business or architectural domain. SQL, GUI designers, workflow languages and regular expressions are familiar examples. In recent years, Domain-Specific Modeling has yielded spectacular productivity improvements in domains such as telephony and embedded systems. By creating graphical or textual languages specific to the needs of an individual project or product line within one company, DSM offers maximum agility. With current tools, creating a language and related tool support is fast enough to make DSM a realistic possibility for projects of all sizes. And to refactor, you just change the generator!

Who should attend
The intended audience consists of developers and technical managers interested in finding out more about DSM. Experience of product lines, building product frameworks or creating DSLs is a bonus, but by no means necessary. Benefits of participation include a better understanding of:
- When to use DSM, and what for
- How to adjust the development process to use DSM
- How to create DSLs and use DSM

Presenters Bios
Steven Kelly is CTO at MetaCase, and has been the lead on the MetaEdit+ DSM tool since 1996. He is also co-founder of the DSM Forum, has served on the committee of the OOPSLA workshops on DSM since 2001, and has been giving metamodeling and DSM tutorials around the world since 1993.
Tel: +358 14 4451 401. Email: stevek@metacase.com, Blog: http://www.metacase.com/blogs/stevek/

Alan Cameron Wills (Microsoft) works on DSL tools for the Visual Studio IDE. Before joining Microsoft, he was a consultant in development methods, and co-developed the Catalysis approach to software development. He has run successful workshops and tutorials in related topics at SPA2005 and OT97-04.
Tel: +44 122 347 9719. Email: awills@microsoft.com. Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/alan_cameron_wills/

Description
How does one go about adopting an agile practice(s)? This is a question that can be answered very well by a pattern which aggregates experiences of experts who have successfully done so in the past.
The agile development community is no longer in its infancy, this conference is the 7th XP conference and many agile methodologies have roots that go back to the mid 90’s. Many of us have successfully adopted, adapted, and even dropped many agile practices on multiple projects. Many (dare I say most?) of us are no longer using ‘canonical’ sets of practices from given methodologies. Case studies and literature reviews have been the traditional methods of reporting this information; they are very valuable but more needs to be said about our collective experiences. Patterns are an excellent vehicle for aggregating experiences; and we currently have the experiences necessary to write real patterns communicating our experiences in adopting agile practices.
The work in this workshop will be seeded with patterns developed at ChiliPlop 06 earlier this year and our results will be made public to the community on a wiki afterwards.

Who should attend?
Everyone of course! Experienced agilists will contribute to the content of the patterns. Those who are practicing but still new to agile practices will get a chance to reinforce their current adoption of practices. Finally those who are still considering agile practices will make sure the patterns address the current questions they need answered to make more informed decisions which practices to adopt and how to do so.

Author Bios
Amr Elssamadisy has been working professionally as a software developer, architect, manager, consultant, etc. (too many titles J ) for over 12 years helping build software systems. His first agile development project was a large project XP effort in 1999 where he had a chance to work and learn from some of the best in the field. Since then he has lead, participated, and guided teams in several large and small agile development projects. He is currently a Principal Consultant at Valtech Technologies where he helps clients solve their problems in building software development systems with different technologies and practices.

Ahmed Elshamy serves ThoughtWorks, Inc. as a Senior Software Developer in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications. During his tenure at ThoughtWorks, Ahmed has worked on multiple strategic agile projects since 2000 in both leasing and insurance domains. He mentored and enabled multiple teams in applying agile software development process and agile best practices. He also worked on integration projects that integrate client server application with legacy systems. Ahmed has experience in .Net and Java technologies. Ahmed contributed to ChiliPlop 2006 hot topics.
 

Human & Social Factors in Software Engineering: motivation and de-motivation in agile development
Helen Sharp, Tracy Hall,  Bjørnar Tessem, Frank Maurer, Daniel Karlström, Yvonne Dittrich

Description
What do you enjoy about developing software? What would make you leave an agile project and join a non-agile project? What kind of people do you like to work with? When does software development become a drag? There is some evidence that job satisfaction increases when using agile methods - why?
In this workshop, we will use an interactive format to answer these questions and explore the effect of organisational, technical and social context on developer motivation. Please come along and share your experiences, pain, joy and insights about what makes software engineering a rewarding (or a frustrating?) occupation.

Who should attend
This workshop is suitable for anyone who is interested in motivation in software engineering, as a developer, a manager or a researcher.

Author bios
Helen Sharp is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing at The Open University and a Senior Visiting Fellow at City University London. She is very active in the agile and interaction design communities and has had a long association with the SPA series of interactive conferences in the UK. Her research focuses on understanding software development practice in order to integrate user-centred concerns and software engineering, and to provide suitable support for software engineers.
Tracy Hall leads the Systems and Software Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire. She is an international expert in the human and organisational aspects of software development processes. She specialises in the empirical investigation of non-technical issues within software engineering. She has published widely in these areas. She is an Associate Editor of the Software Quality Journal, a programme committee member for both the IEEE International Metrics Symposium and the ICSE Experience track. She also co-chaired the Professional Awareness in Software Engineering Conference.
Dr. Bjørnar Tessem is head of the PAILab (programming and artificial intelligence) research group at the University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests include qualitative studies of software engineering, agile methods, intelligent tools for software engineering and artificial intelligence in general. He has chaired and co-chaired several international and national conferences on a wide range of ICT topics.
Dr. Frank Maurer is the head of the e-Business engineering (ebe) group at the University of Calgary. His research interests are agile software methodologies, web engineering, globally distributed software development, experience management and integrating agile methods and interaction design.
He is a member of the PC of the ICSE 2005 Experience Report section and also responsible for the ICSE 2005 proceedings. He was program chair of SEKE 2004 and program co-chair of XP Agile Universe 2003. He is and was a program committee member of various conferences in the area of software engineering, agile methods and knowledge management.
Dr. Daniel Karlström is a member of the Software Engineering Research Group at Lund University. His research interests include integrating agile methods in various organizational environments, human aspects of software process improvement and qualitative and quantitative methods in software engineering research. He is poster co-chair at XP2006.
Dr. Yvonne Dittrich works an associate professor the IT-University of Copenhagen. Her research interests are use oriented design and development of software, end especially the flexibilization of software products and processes in order to accommodate the co-development of work practices and technology. She developed an empirical research approach Cooperative Method Development together with industrial partners which is based on problem oriented software process improvement as a learning cycle both for the industrial partner and for the researchers involved. This approach has been applied in a number of research projects in cooperation with industry.

 

Value Stream Mapping

Description:
Value Stream Mapping is a Lean tool that has a long history of uncovering waste in manufacturing and operational settings; it is also a great tool for software development. In this session, participants will learn simple rules for creating value stream maps, and teams will create maps of real situations. The resulting value stream maps will be presented and critiqued, so participants can envision for themselves how they might use this practical tool.
Participants will discover, through hands-on experience and discussion, how to create and use value stream maps. As the maps are constructed and analyzed, participants will discover how value stream maps create a new perspective on the software development process, one that they can use to evaluate their workflow and pinpoint the biggest opportunities for improvement.

Who Should Attend
This workshop will interest managers and team leads who understand Agile development who are looking for a practical tool they can use to analyze and improve their workflow.

Presenter bio:
Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for thirty years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she provides a business perspective to software development problems.
A popular writer and speaker, Mary’s classes on managing software development have been popular with both large and small companies. She is co-author of the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, published by Addison Wesley in May, 2003 and winner of the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004.

 

How to deliver on the value proposition from real life XP projects
Lars Arne Skår, Jan-Erik Sandberg

Description
Although XP is no longer as controversial as it used to be, it is still hard to initiate and deliver on XP projects in a way that delivers on the promised values. It is as hard as ever to maintain a focus on the XP practices in projects over time.
This may be in areas such as:
• Contractual agreements
• Old habits that die hard (both from developers and customers)
• Accepting that significant start-up investments are needed
• Getting true acceptance of the practices - from the tangible test and build techniques to softer parts like refactoring and pair programming, which still can be very controversial.
• How to interface to formal “toll gates” in larger organizations.
The organizers have been through multiple large scale successful agile projects, which have delivered the starting and ongoing values of an XP approach. Most of the initial customers and organizations were used to traditional waterfall and similar approaches.
The workshop will consist of initial group discussions to share experiences and opinions, and a final fishbowl discussion with a focus on what values XP projects actually provide and how to communicate those to the stakeholders.

Who should attend
The organizers wish to gather project managers, developers and ideally potential customers of xp/agile projects to discuss and share ideas on what values XP projects actually provides for customers and managers. In order to get new views on the topic, a group with mixed experience level on XP is desirable.

Presenter's background
Jan-Erik Sandberg, Chief Quality Officer, Objectware, Norway
Jan-Erik Sandberg founded the Norwegian eXtreme Programming forum 5 years ago, with a strong dedication to evangelize extreme programming to the norwegian community. He has presented XP on several international events - at TechED Europe 2004 he was rated one of the “Top Speakers”. For several years, he has been in charge of the agile track at one of Scandinavia’s largest software conferences. Currently he is technical project manager for an agile project with over 45 developers, and a timeframe of 8 years.

Lars Arne Skår, Chief Technology Officer, TietoEnator Banking Solutions
Lars Skar joined the Norwegian eXtreme Programming forum 3 years ago, and shares Jan-Eriks ambition to evangelize extreme programming and agile development in the Norwegian system development community. Lars actively participates at OOPSLA and other international conferences as conference speaker and in workshops. During his 16 years of experience in the consultancy industry, he has always had a strong focus on training and coaching others. In addition to act as a coach, he has also been an instructor on several international training events.
 

The Coders' Dojo - A different way to teach and learn programming
Christophe Thibaut (cthibaut@octo.com), Emmanuel Gaillot (egaillot@octo.com)
 

Summary
If I want to learn Judo, I will enroll at the nearest dojo, and show up for one hour every week for the next couple years. After two years I may decide to start studying in earnest to progress in the art. Years of further training might be rewarded with a black belt, which merely signals a different stage of learning. No master ever stops learning. If I want to learn object programming... my employer will pack me off to a three-day Java course picked from this year's issue of a big training firm's catalog. Nuts to that – acquiring coding skills is not an “instant gratification” process. We propose a more appropriate way of teaching and learning programming, respecting the depth and subtlety of the craft.

Audience
Developers – those who value their programming skills and have a strong motivation to improve.

Benefits
The Dojo is a long-term process; this one-time session encourages participants to start their own. The format is between a tutorial (interactive instruction) and a workshop (instructive interaction). We pay attention both to participants' payback in improvement of their programming and TDD skills, and to ideas for improving the Dojo format.

Logistics
Attendance is limited to 16 participants. One beamer and a table seating one programming pair are required. One QWERTY keyboard. Seating arrangements should be such that participants can move about freely.

Process
The Coders' Dojo is a weekly programming class. Programmers of varying skill levels meet as equals. They come together – in physical, not virtual space – around an ongoing series of coding challenges, usually small in scope, often patterned after “pragmatic” Dave Thomas' idea of “coding Kata”. The session replicates a “typical” session of the Coders' Dojo.
The Dojo uses different formats according to participants' inclination. In the session we will use the Randori format, in which:
– at any one time there is one pair “on the mat” (i.e. at the keyboard)
– the rest of the group observes via beamer
– the pair writes a test, codes, and refactors for one 7-minute timebox
– at the end of the timebox, the copilot becomes driver, a new copilot comes forward from the group of observers, and the driver goes back to observing

The session schedule is as follows:
09:00-09:10 Bootstrapping: introduction to the Coders' Dojo, rules of engagement
09:15-09:30 Brainstorm possible topics, vote
09:30-10:15 Randori – first topic
10:15-10:30 Debrief: what worked, what needs improving, new ideas
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45-11:30 Randori – second topic (or continue first)
11:30-12:00 Session retrospective

History
The Coders' Dojo in Paris has been running on a weekly basis since January 2005. A “sister” Dojo is also running bi-monthly basis in Finland. The session itself has been presented at XP2005, XP Day Benelux 2005 and XP Day Germany 2005.

Presenters
Christophe Thibaut has been working in IT for 15 years as a Developer, Project Manager and Consultant for Banking and Industrial groups in France. He is interested in everything that can help teams in their day to day work of creating liable, usable and maintainable software. As such he has been practicing Extreme Programming with small teams since 2001 in the context of lecacy applications. He's also involved in the Developers Dojo Experiment in Paris since it's creation.

Emmanuel Gaillot is a software engineer and an experienced designer for theatre and dance. He has adapted XP practices and principles to the theatrical production process, and he currently works on instilling theatre practices back into the field of software making. Emmanuel's areas of expertise and interests include self-organizing teams, software making and Extreme Programming. He is involved in the conduct of the Coders' Dojo Experiment in Paris, France, where he also works for Octo Technology as an XP coach.
 

Description:
Agile methodologies are just as prone to mistakes, deviations and subversion as any other methodology. This workshop is intended to discover and share agile process anti-patterns then discuss and present creative solutions.
Anti-patterns, also referred to as pitfalls, are classes of commonly-reinvented bad solutions to problems. They are studied, as a category, in order that they may be avoided in the future, and that instances of them may be recognized when investigating non-working systems.
This workshop focuses on participants’ (less than perfect) experiences in the workplace and mines the collective wisdom of the group to come up with creative solutions via a fishbowl process followed by breakout sessions and then group presentations. This is a half day workshop.
A fishbowl is structured conversation technique where a small number of people sit in front of the group (in the fishbowl) and converse with each other. The audience listens and at any time a member of the audience may become a member of the fishbowl, replacing one of the existing members.
Sample starter agile process anti-patterns: Testing Not Completed by Iteration End, Functional Specialists & Handoffs, Lack of Automated Testing, 100% Utilization.

Who Should Attend
This workshop is for anyone who has ever worked on an imperfect agile team or who desires to understand how things can go wrong. Participants will come away with a broader understanding of the ways agile projects can get off track and a variety of solutions for addressing these problems.

Presenter’s Background:
Wayne Allen has been a technology professional since 1987 and is currently a Product Development Manager for Corillian Corporation where he manages several agile teams. He has been coaching organizations in adoption of agile methods since 2000. Starting in 2002 Wayne began specializing on the areas outside the core of agile development, namely product management, quality assurance, human factors, documentation and project management. Wayne is one of the organizers for the Portland, OR USA XP Users Group (XPDX http://www.xpdx.org).

 

Exploring Agile Project Parameters

Description
When a team sets out to apply agile software development on a project, they soon will discover there are a bunch of parameters and variables that need to be set. For example, how long will their development cycles be, what tasks will the apply pair programming to, who will maintain tracking information, etc.
This workshop aims to provide a guide to teams on topics that they will need to develop working agreements on within their project teams to help the team get clear about how they want to apply agile techniques. The goal of this workshop is to produce a set of questions that teams can use at the start of a software development project to help them get clear about how they plan to apply agile techniques.

Who shoud attend
This session will interest coaches, team leads and managers who want to set their project teams up for successful implementation of agile software development. Participants should have some experience of working in agile software development.

Presenters' backgrounds
Rachel Davies is as an independent coach and facilitator in UK. She is passionate about agile software development because it can increase the chance of success in the face of complex problems and recognizes that teams are made-up of individuals rather than resources. Rachel specializes in XP and Scrum flavours of agile development and advocates the use of retrospectives to help teams adapt their process to their context. Rachel is a frequent presenter at agile conferences and serving director of the Agile Alliance.
Rachel is founder of Agile Experience Limited and also a senior consultant with Cutter Consortium.

David Hussman has designed and created software for more than 13 years in a variety of domains: digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, retail, and education to name a few. For the past 6 years, David has mentored and coached agile teams in the U.S., Canada, Russia, and Ukraine. Along with leading workshops and presenting at conferences in the U.S. and Europe, David has contributed to numerous publications and several books. David co-owns the Minneapolis based SGF Software, is a senior consultant with Cutter Consortium, and has contributed to the agile curriculum for Capella University and University of Minnesota.
 

Extreme Construction: Making Agile Accessible
Joe Bergin, Fred Grossman, Jutta Eckstein

Description
Get a jumpstart on the basics of Agile Development and Extreme Programming (XP) in a day, without programming. This workshop will use non-programming construction techniques to teach most of the XP practices in a fun and interesting format. Build a non-software artifact using practices of XP. See how the synergy of the XP practices brings benefits to you and your organization.
Many people have an interest in agile methodologies, and XP in particular. Managers need a way to evaluate XP from an institutional benefits perspective and knowing how it actually works can be a help in this. Programmers need to learn the practices before they can begin to effectively use them. They also need a way to see how their current development habits may be in conflict with XP practices. Educators and coaches want effective ways to introduce XP and build teams. This workshop can provide required background for all of these needs in a fun and informative way.
This workshop has been given many times in industrial, conference, and academic settings. It has proven to be an effective way to train individuals and teams, and also to help a new agile team coalesce into an effective working unit.

Who should attend

Managers and other stakeholders interested in an in-depth understanding of XP practices will experience how it works and get a chance to evaluate XP.
Educators/trainers/coaches interested in a technique for teaching XP principles will learn how to use a valuable teaching exercise.
Developers wanting a quick-start to XP will get familiarity with the actual XP practices.
There is no required background. This is accessible to novices and non-programmers. Having read one of the XP books, such as Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained, will be a plus, but not essential.

Presenters
Joe Bergin
Joe (jbergin@pace.edu) is a long time participant at Agile conferences. He has, with Fred, co-led workshops at OOPSLA and CASCON on XP, including the past two years. He uses XP in the classroom and developed this exercise as an outgrowth of the Extreme Hour, needing something that covered more of the practices, but still possible to do in a day. Joe is an educator and practitioner with 33 years experience, 17 in OO, and 5 or so in agile practice and consulting. He is the author of four books.

Jutta Eckstein
Jutta (www.jeckstein.com, info@jeckstein.com) is an independent consultant and trainer for over ten years. She has a unique experience in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large mission-critical projects. This is also the topic of her book Agile Software Development in the Large. She is a member of the board of the AgileAlliance and a member of the program committee of many different European and American conferences in the area of agile development, object-orientation and patterns.

Fred Grossman
Fred (grossman@pace.edu) has been teaching for more than 30 years and has been involved in software development for 40 years. He is a professor and Program Chair of the Doctor of Professional Studies in Computing in the Ivan G. Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems of Pace University. He has, with Joe, co-led workshops at OOPSLA and CASCON on XP and trained and coached XP teams in academic and industrial settings.

Joe and Jutta frequently collaborate, especially on pedagogical issues. Fred and Joe jointly teach in a Doctoral program in which this is used to introduce an agile software engineering course and build team spirit. All three are certified ScrumMasters as well as XP trainer/coaches.