News & Events

Lean/Agile Seminars
Agile Bazaar is presenting a series of seminars by leading experts in Lean and Agile software development. These seminars cover a variety of topics in considerable detail. We are bringing in world leaders in a forum where different approaches can be discussed and compared.

Different approaches work for different projects and teams. We find great value in presenting different approaches that have worked and letting you interact with industry leaders to gain insight into what might work best for you..

Meetings
 Agile Bazaar has regular meetings featuring knowledgable speakers on a variety of topics relevent to Lean and Agile sofware development. See our meeting calendar for more details.

Rescheduled
March 27 - Developer Workspaces Enable Agile Teams, Steve Berczuk, Cyrus Innovations.

Workspace Managememt is often an afterthought for teams, agile or not. For teams to work effectively developers need machanisms to help ensure that their changes will integrate well with others' work. Good workspace practices also improve team productivity by avoiding "works for me" conversations and by decreasing ramp up times when people start new projects.

This talk will discuss some of the patterns and practices for workspace management that you can apply to help developers be more effective.

(Note: This session was originally scheduled for March 6 - it will now be held on March 27.)

.

MIT, E51-315 , 6:30pm-9:00pm (Networking 6:00 - 6:30pm)

Read more

Deep Lean Seminar

Nov. 3-4, 2007 - Cambridge, MA.

Top experts in the field of Lean and Agile software development Mary Poppendiek, Nancy Van Schooenderwoert and Jeff Sutherland come together to take an in-depth look at the power, techniques and pitfalls of these approaches.

Update: Speaker Presentations now online - see the seminar agenda.

Read more

Agile Bazaar

Agile Bazaar   is a reference to the book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Raymond, a seminal work on Open Source software development.

In this work, Eric describes the messy, apparently chaotic, yet extraordinarily productive and effective approaches used in developing software like Linux and the Apache Web server. Lean and Agile techniques provide productivity, quality and predictability.

Read more

The Deep Lean seminar was a great success - thank you to our speakers, volunteers, and everyone who joined us at MIT! For one attendees view of the seminar, see what Damon Poole had to say.

The Speaker Presentations are now available on the Deep Lean seminar page.

Agile software development is a programming and project management approach that provides:

  • Rapid delivery of production quality code through a higher quality
    of communication and focus
  • A communication model which earns a rare level of trust between
    management and development teams
  • Fully tested and documented, production-quality code delivered
    incrementally like clockwork
  • Delivery cycles typically of only 2 to 4 weeks.

Key Concepts

  • Agile is an umbrella term for the ideas and practices of a growing collection of people working to improve the software development process which had badly needed improvement.Agile commonly includes Lean, Scrum, XP and other categories that are popular.   For more information see The Agile Alliance; The Agile Manifesto. 
  • Lean is a term derived from Toyota's TPS (Toyota Production System) that evolved over many decades and is the envy of  all industries in many ways.  Lean software development is included in the Agile umbrella by many and focuses on eliminating waste, optimizing the whole and continuous improvement.  For it's application to software, Mary and Tom Poppendieck are the most respected authors and consultants.  They will also be speakers at the November 2007 "Deep Lean" seminar. For more information see Poppendieck.com.  Their latest book is "Implementing Lean Software Development: From concept to Cash". 
  • Scrum is a metaphor from the game of Rugby that was originally used in a Harvard Business article in 1986 by two Japanese academics to describe the way Japanese electronics industry innovation was progressing so rapidly.  This metaphor was adopted by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland at Easel Corp. in 1993 and introduced widely at OOPSLA in '95.  This has now become a worldwide phenomenon.  See Jeff's posting of Deep Agile with GBC.
  • Extreme Programming (XP) was developed by Kent Beck and others and now is a widely recognized Agile category comparable only to Scrum in worldwide recognition.  It focuses primarily on best engineering practices done in an iterative and incremental way.  It recommends continuous, integration, testing, code review, code simplification, and much more.  A good resource is Getting Started with XP.

--Jay Conne