Rocky Mountain Software Symposium

November 19 - 21, 2010 - Denver, CO


Sheraton Denver Tech Center Hotel
7007 South Clinton Street
Englewood, CO   80112
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in DenverNovember 15 - 17, 2013.
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Matt Stine

Enterprise Java/Cloud Consultant

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.



Presentations

The Seven Wastes of Software Development

One of the first principles of lean software development is the elimination of waste. Shigeo Shingo identified seven types of manufacturing waste in his "A Study of the Toyota Production System." Later, the Poppendieck's translated these to seven wastes of software development.

The seven wastes:

  • Partially Done Work
  • Relearning
  • Extra Features
  • Handoffs
  • Delays
  • Task Switching
  • Defects

In this session, we'll examine each of these wastes and look at some of their common manifestations, both in our coding practices and in our development methodologies. We'll also examine strategies for eliminating each of these wastes from our development efforts.

Yes You Kanban

Kanban. What is it? It is most certainly not just moving sticky notes around on a board. Far from that, it is a method for gradual, evolutionary improvement of existing software processes. That's right, existing software processes. There is no "Kanban Development Process." Think you're "doing Kanban?" Think again.

In this session we'll examine the byproducts of the "Kanban method" and its use of a WIP-limiting, pull-based mechanism for managing a software team's work. Next, we'll examine "A day in that Kanban life" in order to get our minds around how a Kanban system works. We'll then step back in time and examine the roots of Kanban in the lean manufacturing methods used at Toyota. We'll also walk through a little queuing theory to understand why Kanban systems work. Finally, we'll walk through Kanban thought-leader David Anderson's "Principles of the Kanban Method."

You'll leave this session equipped to start a Kanban change initiative in your team, along with the tools to make it successful.

Agile Development with OSGi

There isn't much said in typical Agile conversation about architecture and modularity. We will attempt to redress this omission by examining an agile approach to logical system architecture coupled with a potential implementation for the Java platform.

Tracer Bullet Development (TBD) is a technique that allows you to prove out the proposed architecture of your system by firing a "tracer bullet" through a vertical slice of your system that exercises all of its horizontal components. It has multiple benefits, including encapsulation, decoupled code, parallel code development, and more.

OSGi is a specification for a dynamic module system for Java with multiple open source implementations. It allows you to modularize your system into "bundles" which essentially firewall their own classloader space. Objects running within a bundle can only see types that they explicitly import and only expose types that they explicitly export. They interact with other bundles by expose and consuming services which are registered under a public interface.

At face value it seems that Tracer Bullet Development and OSGi are a match made in heaven!

In this talk, we'll examine the principles undergirding TBD, the pros and cons of this approach, and walk through the design of a system using TBD. We'll also get a brief introduction to OSGi and its various implementations, look at some of the tools available for OSGi development, and then implement our TBD design.

The Agile Guerilla

So you discovered agile software development this weekend. You've finally found the tools that you're going to use to fix your team. Do you rush in to work Monday morning with a slide deck in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, ready to bludgeon the first person who checks in untested code? How do you think that's going to work out for you? I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn't play out too well. There is a better way.

In this talk, we'll look at strategies for taking a guerrilla warfare approach to agile adoption. We'll walk through many of the agile practices and discuss how we can apply them on our own and still deliver value, including:

  • test-driven development on an island
  • guerilla continuous integration
  • personal kanban and other workflow practices
  • and more...

After we've gotten as agile as we can on our own, we'll show how you can infect your team and your boss with the agile bug by demonstrating the dramatic increase in your own productivity and code quality. After all, sometimes it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Books

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Biomedical Informatics for Cancer Research Buy from Amazon
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  • This book will review work from a number of researchers who have produced open source software addressing the need for data management, integration, analysis, and visualization to aid cancer research. With the advent of high-throughput technologies in biomedicine, the need for data management and appropriate data analysis tools in genomics has increased dramatically, joining clinical trials data as a major driver of informatics at cancer research centers. The gathering of this data requires careful encoding of metadata, usually through the use of controlled vocabularies or ontologies, as well as the linking of data from model organisms, done at both a physiological level (e.g., anatomy) and at a molecular level (e.g., orthology). This data will then find use within computational and statistical models, which require data pipelines and analysis systems, as well as algorithms, visualization methods, and computational modeling systems. We will introduce open source tools available for these aspects of the problem. The editors plan to divide the book into five sections, beginning with a section containing high level overviews of the field and key issues. This will include an introductory review of informatics in cancer research, followed by five overviews addressing issues in authentication and authorization, data management, data pipelines and annotations, algorithms and models, and the NCI caBIG initiative. This will be followed by sections dedicated to data systems, data pipelines, algorithms for analysis and visualization, and modeling systems. Each of these areas has seen publication of open source tools, ranging from the widely known R/Bioconductor package to little known but powerful systems such as SImmune for biochemical modeling. The area of laboratory information management systems has seen development of a number of unpublished but powerful systems, which we would also include. Three groups have agreed to provide chapters in this area (USC/Norris CAFE extensible clinical trials system, St Jude Unified LIMS, Fox Chase/British Columbia flow cytometry LIMS). While there has been a great deal of development of informatics tools that can be applied to problems in cancer research, there has not been adequate dissemination of details on these tools to the community. As such, there remains low adoption of all but a few tools. This book aims to increase overall adoption of tools by providing cancer center leaders and researchers with a single volume detailing both issues that must be addressed and tools that are ready for use.