#2782

Talks

Some talks I’ve given in the past couple of years. These are PDFs of the PowerPoint deck with the speaker notes. There is often related material either in my blog or in one of my publications.

Distributed agile Development: Experiments at Microsoft patterns & practices

Most agile methodologies tend to assume that the team is co-located in a single team room. They give little guidance as to how to address team distribution although proven practices are starting to emerge within the community. The Microsoft patterns & practices team has been experimenting with distributed teams for several years, mining proven practices from the community and experimenting them out on numerous agile projects. This talk summarizes those learnings and proven practices and gives examples of their application – both good and bad – within our teams.

There have been several versions of this deck. This is the final version of the talk I gave at; Agile 2009 (Chicago), patterns & practices Summit 2009 (Redmond) and Much Ado About Agile 2009 (Vancouver).

The deck includes speaker notes. There is also a video and podcast which cover a pervious version of the talk. You might want to check those out too.

Continuous Integration and Defense In Depth: Experiences at Microsoft

Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of building and testing the application under development. Usually right after each and every check-in. CI grew out of the agile software development community but can add value to almost any project. This talk will describe the basic approach to CI and also some other practices teams can adopt to get even more out of their investment in CI. The talk will also cover the Microsoft patterns & practices team’s experience with CI and show some of the likely cost savings of adopting this practice on your team.

The cost/time savings achieved by using CI were published in the following paper (accompanying errata are also available). For more resources on this topic see my blog post about the talk.

Presented at the p&p Summit in Quebec and to the South Sound .NET Users Group (Olympia, WA) and internally at Microsoft.

Scaling Agile Up and Out: A Tale from the Trenches

It seems like everyone wants to scale their agile teams. The Agile approach to software development needs to scale up to larger team sizes as projects grow in scope. Agile also needs to scale out to handle geographically distributed teams. Both are challenging propositions for many teams. I talk about my experiences at Microsoft; scaling agile up on the Visual Studio Tools for Office team and scaling out on the radically distributed teams within the patterns & practices group.

This talk is based on two papers; Agility and the Inconceivably Large (2007) and Distributed Agile Development at patterns & practices (2008) and includes updated information from the Visual Studio 2008 release. For more resources on this topic see my post about the talk.

Presented at the San Francisco Agile Meetup (Feb2010), Agile Development Practices 2008 and as part of the University of Washington Certificate Program in Agile Development (with Mitch Lacey). I’ve also given variations of this talk to internal Microsoft groups and at Microsoft executive briefings.

Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices

Distributed development is a fact of life for many agile teams. Microsoft’s patterns & practices group has been following an agile, distributed development approach for several years. This talk outlines the challenges faced by distributed agile teams and details some of the best practices to address these issues and build successful distributed teams.

Presented at the p&p Summit in Redmond. The talk was recorded, you can watch the video here. A white paper on the same topic is also available.

I was also interviewed about the white paper by David Starr, you can listen to the interview here on Elegant Code.

A Hundred Days of Continuous Integration

Our experiences at patterns & practices using continuous integration (CI) as part of a distributed agile team. The presentation and paper focus on analyzing the efficiency gains from CI and best practices around distributed development and CI.

Presented as an experience report at Agile 2008 and (in draft form) to the Seattle XP Users Group. The paper and accompanying errata are also available (the errata covers minor errors in the data analysis which came to light after I’d submitted the original paper to Agile 2008 and the IEEE.

Patterns and Practices @ patterns & practices

A talk about the thinking behind p&p’s approach to building software.

Presented at the p&p Summit in Quebec. There is no accompanying paper for this talk but the deck includes lots of references to blog posts with supporting material.

Agility and the Inconceivably Large

Scaling agile on very large software projects. Experiences with the Visual Studio Tools for Office team and it’s migration to a more agile Feature Crews based approach for the Visual Studio 2005 release.

Presented as an experience report at Agile 2007. The paper is also available online.