Jean Tabaka, June 23, 2008

Attacking Waste In Software: Three Practices We Must Embrace Now!

One of the seven principles of Lean Thinking is "Eliminate Waste". This principle focuses on adding value in all that we do in building software. To explicitly attack waste in our work, we should first consider lessons from the "Take-Make-Waste" model of 20th century industry. Consider the automotive industry in the United States. The total amount of resources and materials going into the making of a car may result in as little 2% remaining as part of the final delivered product. Such 98% bloat is unsustainable for the software industry of the 21st century. To reduce that waste, we must aggressively embrace new modes of value delivery that secure resources and apply them wisely and efficiently in delivery value.

Jean Tabaka offers three pivotal practices that we must embrace if we intend to aggressively attack waste in software delivery: provide software features in the form of a service (Software as a Service, Saas); use Community to pull valuable, prioritized feature requests for these services; and, apply Agile Software Development in order to deliver requested features into these environments. When software vendors and IT groups embrace these three practices, they de facto eliminate waste. This is true not only within their organizations. They in turn, ultimately, reduce waste that surrounds the entire industry. And this in turn brings the industry into alignment with the broad 21st century global view on managing our scarce resources.

As always, our monthly meetings are free to attend and open to local software professionals, students and faculty. Feel free to pass this announcement along to your colleagues.

Speaker

Jean Tabaka is an Agile Coach with Rally Software Development in Boulder Colorado. With over 25 years of experience in the software development industry, she has navigated numerous plan-driven methodologies in a variety of contexts (government, IT, consulting) and in a variety of roles (programmer, architect, project manager, methodologist). Her move to agile software development approaches came in the late 90's as a result of studying DSDM in the UK. Since that time, she has become an agile devotee, consulting with teams of all sizes worldwide wishing to derive more value faster through the adoption of agile principles and practices. She specializes in scaling agile practices, applying lean principles and practices, and building continuous planning and testing into organizations. She also creates a strong collaborative approach in how organizations adopt agile.

Jean is a Certified ScrumMaster and Practitioner, a Certified ScrumMaster Trainer, and a Certified Professional Facilitator. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of "Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders" published in the Addison-Wesley Agile Software Development Series.

Sponsor

The June 2008 meeting sponsors are:

Rally Software helps organizations perfect the art of software development through Agile and Lean practices. Agile development practices are quickly becoming a mainstream approach to software development because they shorten development cycles, minimize risk and help better prioritize features and customer requests. In fact, in a recent third-party study, Rally customer BMC Software was proven to have development cycles that were nearly three times faster than the industry average and one quarter the expected number of defects with double the team size.

Our on campus sponsor is The Games Club, a tri-institutional (MSCD, UCD, and CCD) club that seeks to unite the campus and provide a closer-knit college community to Auraria Campus. The Funds raised by the games club through sponsorship of events like Agile Denver is used to help fund scholarships to club members and to encourage participation in the Homeward Bound project.

Location

The meeting will be held in the Tivoli Student Union (TV) building, in Room 440/540.

The Tivoli is located on the Auraria Campus, within walking distance of Downtown Denver via Larimer Street crossing Speer. You can reach the campus from the I-25 south Colfax or Speer exits.

Please review or print out the parking map for reference.

Parking on site costs $5 to attendees of our event and there should be parking available in the lots off of Auraria Parkway and Ninth Street. Be sure to mention that you are attending an on campus event otherwise they might assume you are there for a sports event.