The folks over at ThoughtWorks are doing a webinar entitled Making Distributed Software Development Work next Tuesday, April 8, 2008. From ThoughtWorks:
Join ThoughtWorks’ Matthew Simons and Forrester’s Carey Schwaber, as they discuss how to ensure successful software delivery when working with distributed teams.
As part of my continuing interview series with thought leaders in the agile industry, here is an interview with Ryan Martens, CTO of Rally Software Development. Ryan is a devout member of the software industry since the early 1980’s. In the mid-90’s, Ryan moved into consulting and re-engineering using Internet technologies with two different companies and numerous clients. His last start-up was acquired by BEA Systems where Ryan directed product management for BEA’s Portal. Since 2002, Ryan has focused his efforts on changing the software industry through Rally Software. Every day, Ryan drives Rally toward becoming a sustainable business, while working to help customers realize the benefits of software agility. Ryan is a board member on the Agile Alliance, Colorado Conservation Trust, Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado and the Knight Foundation, as well as being a husband, father and farmer in Boulder, Colorado.
Aside from all of this goodness, Ryan is just a flat out great guy, a good friend, and very approachable. Our team works closely with him and his folks at Rally to bring agile practices to the forefront of our company’s development activities. I’d like to offer my thanks to Ryan for all the help he’s given us and for taking the time out of his busy schedule to share his insights about agile software development.
Well, after a rough start getting to the ESRI Dev Summit, the rest of the week was fantastic. I had a great time meeting up with old friends and making lots of new ones too. Thanks to the hard working folks at ESRI, the Dev Summit was a great success again this year. If you’re a GIS developer, skip the User Conference in the summer and make sure you head to the Dev Summit next year! Tons of other people have already given their wrap-up for this year’s Summit so I’ll point you to some of the good one’s and just provide you with some pictures from the Summit. Cheers to ESRI and everyone involved in making this a great event! See you all next year!
Summit Wrap Ups:
Whenever I describe agile practices to people for the first time, the response is usually something along the lines of “Seems like common sense to me.” I agree completely. I think that the more people approach agile with the common sense approach and avoid the dogmatic side of any methodology adoption, the better off they’ll be. I recently found this quote from Buddha that really speaks to both the common sense theme of agile practices and the anti-dogmatic view of methodologies that we have been promoting at DTS Agile:
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it
or who has said it,
not even if I have said it,
unless it agrees with your own reason
and your own common sense.
