Russell Miles, Managing Director of Open Credo

"Never a dull moment" describes Russ pretty well. While working as a full-time Technologist for a defence contractor Russ also completed writing 2 books ("AspectJ Cookbook", "Learning UML 2.0" for O'Reilly Media) and obtained a BSc and then an MSc in Software Engineering from Oxford University. This multi-tasking tendency (or "gift/curse", depending on how you look at it) has enabled Russ to gain a huge amount of experience working in a diverse collection of industry sectors.

Finally specialising in the "cloud-scale" enterprise systems domain, long before "cloud" was even mentioned, Russ has continually worked on in high-availability, high traffic web and internal event-based systems.

Russ took the decision in 2009 to take on the reins at OpenCredo as Managing Director and consultant. To ensure that he has as little spare time as possible, Russ is also a keen contributor to open source projects and an active track host and speaker or "noise maker" on large scale, enterprise systems integration both locally in London and internationally. He's also found the time to co-author a third book for O'Reilly titled "Head First Software Development".

Russ' latest project is working on a leading edge tool for business to make the most out of the burgeoning flexible IT commodity markets that are enabled by Cloud and related technologies. He's also in the process of turning all this first-hand experience into, yep you guessed it, another book.

Presentation: "Soup to Nuts - Harnessing Lean to break through the local optimisation"

Track: Advancing Agile to the Next stage with Lean

Time: Wednesday 12:05 - 13:05

Location: Franciscan I & II

Abstract: We've spent 10 years now breaking a fundamental rule of Lean Thinking. By chasing increased, and valuable, agility in software development we've often forgotten that the actual development is only one small part of the software delivery system. In many ways we're all guilty of local optimising for the problems we were left with in actual software development, and largely ignoring the harder problems of how to improve the whole software delivery pipeline such that we define and deliver more real value.

But it's not all bad news. Through lean thinking and visualising the whole system of software delivery there are now real tools and practices appearing that bring the whole system of software delivery together. This talk will share the secrets of how lean thinking and the emerging Agile Operations practices of DevOps and Continuous Delivery are to bring continuous improvement to the whole software delivery system.

Training: "Experiment Driven Process Change: Applying Lean and Agile to Tune your Development Process"

Track: Tutorial

Time: Monday 09:00 - 16:00

Location: Olympic

Abstract: A software development system, and the process by which it is governed, is a malleable thing. A constantly changing complex social system that, when continuously tuned, can result in delivering valuable software that can be the difference between success for you, or success for your competitor.

However how to drive this highly malleable social system is something we're just not usually taught!

Making changes to a highly complex, people-driven process like software development can be akin to choosing between cutting the red wire or the blue wire on a nuclear bomb - either way there's going to be a mess, how big is the only question. Another alternative is to take on so-called thought-leaders and process experts and to apply their techniques, frameworks (certifications!?) and practices as doctrine. However that's just asking someone else to cut the wires and then blaming them for the boom.

There is a better way. It's time to cut the process-guru apron strings and take ownership of your own software development process. It's your way of delivering value through software development, and so you need the tools and techniques to improve it. No-one else has the magic answer. This tutorial is about giving you the tools to begin to construct a real answer for yourself, to set yourself up for changing and improving your own software development system.

In this tutorial we will start from first principles to (re)discover what a software development system actually is. Attendees will discuss their own contexts against the backdrop of common patterns that will help everyone discover the idiosyncrasies and shared qualities of any software development system. During the morning through exercises you'll learn how to capture your system and how to apply lean and agile thinking to understanding the fundamental question "how do we deliver value through software development".

The afternoon will dive into how to construct meaningful and well-organised process experiments. How to assess those experiments and drive effective change into your own software development process, garnering support and motivating those involved to embrace your well-reasoned improvements as their own. The output of which will be each attendee having taken away not only a number of ideas, tools and techniques to apply to their own software development process, but the knowledge on how to reason and continuously discover more improvements going forward.