John Carnell

Presentations

The Art of Producing Software: Applying Lean Concepts to Transform Your Software Development Organization

Waste is an insidious beast that drains the productivity of development teams and the organizations they work in. Many organizations are now realizing that by turning their gaze inward they can streamline their overall development processes, deliver higher quality products faster and save significant amounts of money.

This talk will look at how to use Lean and Toyota Production Systems manufacturing techniques to streamline how your team builds software.

Waste is an insidious beast that drains the productivity of development teams and the organizations they work in. Many organizations are now realizing that by turning their gaze inward they can streamline their overall development processes, deliver higher quality products faster and save significant amounts of money.

In this talk we will look at the "Lean" techniques first developed by companies like Toyota and how they can be applied to common software development practices. We will walk through such concepts as identifying the different types of waste you might encounter in a software development effort, using Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to help measure the impact of that waste and different techniques you can use to eliminate that waste.

You will see a real-world case study of how the Lean methodology helped one company realize a significant costs savings. By the time the talk is done you will be able to take the lessons learned and use them to build real-world, hard dollar business cases that you can show to your upper management.

Audience: This talk is geared towards new and existing technical leaders. This talk will include very little technology and non-leads might find this talk not directly useful to their day-to-day work.

It's All About Leadership

The role of the technical lead has radically changed over the last several years. It used to be the technical lead was about being the senior developer on a team that made sure the code was getting written. You were the individual who knew the most about the technology stack you wrote the applications with.

This talk will look at the ten most common traits needed for leadership and will look at how they can be applied to yourself or other technical leads in your team.

The role of the technical lead has radically changed over the last several years. It used to be the technical lead was about being the senior developer on a team that made sure the code was getting written. You were the individual who knew the most about the technology stack you wrote the applications with.

However, as projects have gotten larger, technical leads now have to deal with such things as offshore development teams, more complex projects and shorter delivery times, the role of a technical lead has now shifted from being less about technology and more about leadership. Many of us have been on projects where the technical leadership was the critical inflection point between success and failure.

This talk will look at the ten most common traits needed for leadership and will look at how they can be applied to yourself or other technical leads in your team. The talk will cover such topics as communication, planning and working through people problems. We will also talk about how you as a technical leader can remain relevant in our fast-paced field.

Audience: This talk is geared towards new and existing technical leaders. This talk will include very little technology and non-leads might find this talk not directly useful to their day-to-day work.

Racing with Rhinos: Using Springs and Grails to Achieve Competitive Velocity

One of the holy grails of an enterprise architecture team is to provide a light-weight development framework that can be used to quickly build first-to-market applications while still providing a migration path for these applications to a more robust corporate enterprise stack. (e.g. J2EE).

This talk will look at how you can leverage Grails, Groovy and Spring to build applications that can start small and grow to integrate with your enterprise systems.

One of the holy grails of an enterprise architecture team is to provide a light-weight development framework that can be used to quickly build first-to-market applications while still providing a migration path for these applications to a more robust corporate enterprise stack. (e.g. J2EE).

Until recently, this type of development stack has been unattainable. However, with the explosion of development frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Grails this type of flexibility is within reach of any development organization.

This talk will look at how you can leverage Grails, Groovy and Spring to build applications that can start small and grow to integrate with your enterprise systems. Some of the topics covered include: key design patterns that should be leveraged to enable flexibility in Grails, how to use Spring within Grails to provide a layer of abstraction to move to a full J2EE stack and using Web Services (SOAP and REST) to provide easy access to corporate data sources.

Limber Groovy: Making Your Code More Flexible with Groovy

Groovy is an extremely powerful and dynamic scripting language that can allow development teams to build extreme flexibility into their applications. However, leveraging this flexibility in Groovy requires developers to break many of the paradigms they have built over the years surrounding such things as object-oriented design and programming with static languages.

This talk will start with the basics by showing Java developers how to script enable their applications using Groovy, functional programming techniques and exploring the ins and outs of the Groovy Meta-Object Programming (MOP) model.

Groovy is an extremely powerful and dynamic scripting language that can allow development teams to build extreme flexibility into their applications. However, leveraging this flexibility in Groovy requires developers to break many of the paradigms they have built over the years surrounding such things as object-oriented design and programming with static languages.

This talk will start with the basics by first showing Java developers how to script enable their applications using Groovy. The talk topics will then progress into more intermediate subjects like how to use functional programming techniques to build flexibility in your code. We will specifically be looking at how the prudent use of things like closures can eliminate some of the more common design patterns like the Template Method and Visitor patterns.

Finally, we will explore the ins and outs of the Groovy Meta-Object Programming (MOP) model.