Scrum Breakfast/October: Enhancing agile development with software assessment

An agile process replaces upfront design with the focus on the ability to react and to decide based on the current situation. But, to take the right decision we need to be able to assess the situation accurately and fast. However, software systems are large and complex and they handle large amounts of data. Thus, they present many more details than we can reliably control. Approaching the problem in an ad-hoc manner does not benefit us.

Assessment is a critical activity to ensure proper decisions involving large amounts of details. And it is expensive, too, with various studies reporting assessment to account for as much as 50% of the total development effort. As such, it should be addressed explicitly in the development process.

In this talk, Tudor Girba will provide an overview on the problem of assessment and illustrate how the current popular approaches fail to solve it because they are either ad-hoc or too generic. He then describes agile assessment, a new approach that puts emphasis on offering contextual and continuous feedback.

Speaker

Tudor Girba attained his PhD in 2005 from the University of Berne, Switzerland, and he now works as a consultant at Sw-eng. Software Engineering GmbH. His main expertise lies in the area of software engineering with focus on software assessment, and he is currently helping companies assess and manage large software systems and data sets. He is one of the main architects and developers of the Moose platform (http://moosetechnology.org), and he participated in the development of several other assessment tools, models and techniques. He is the president of the Moose Association and the Treasurer of the Swiss Group for Object-Oriented Systems and Environments (CHOOSE).

08:00	-	08:35	Registration, Coffee & Gipfeli
08:35	-	09:50	Talk & Discussion
09:50	-	10:50	Networking, Coffee & Informal Discussion Free Coaching! Bring a problem or help with the solution! 3x 20 Minute Sessions in the coaching room.

Time, Location:

• Date: Wednesday, 6 October 2010
  
• Location: SwissICT, Vulkanstrasse 120, 8048 Zurich (above the Jeep-Dealership).
  
• Registration through the SwissICT
  
• The LAS core team will meet from 11.00 to 12.30. Interested people are more than welcome!
  

P.S. If you are not yet a member, please support the SwissICT and become a member! They provide the venue, coffee and gipfeli without charge so this can stay a free event.