David Hussman
Northern Virginia Software Symposium
Reston · Apr 30 - May 2, 2010
Agility Coach/Instructor/Practioner
David teaches and coaches the adoption and improvement of agility as a delivery tool. His work includes helping companies of all sizes all over the world. Sometimes he is pairing with developers and testers, while other times he is helping to invent, evolve and plan the delivery of all types of products and projects. David also spends a great deal of time helping leaders at all levels find ways to pragmatically use agility to foster innovation.
Prior to working as a full time coach, David spent years building software in a variety of domains: digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education to name a few. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes to create better and cooler products in competitive cycles.
Along with teaching and coaching, David participates in conferences around the world. He is the recipient of the Agile Alliance, 2009 Gordon Pask Award. David continuously contributes to books and various publications.
For coaching information, presentations, and more, visit www.devjam.com
Presentations
Agility as a Tool: Getting Ready to Iterate
Many people simplistically apply agile recipes, assuming a one size fits all approach. This may lead to naive use beliefs like collocation breeds instant success. While sitting together always helps, it does not mean that people spontaneously collaborate to create sustainable value.
Instead of approaching agile methods like a recipe, this session will teach you to design agility that is a useful tool for your project community. We will cover practice selection ideas, tools for creating healthy development eco-systems and product discover tools. If you would like to improve the stickiness of your agility, stop in learn a pile of techniques to use before holding your first planning session.
What Stops You From Delivering? : Flow and the Theory of Constraints
What stops you from delivering to your customers and what truly prevents incremental learning in your project community? How much of it lies in coding issues? Do you even need to write code to learn where to go or how to get there?
For many companies, being agile means producing working code from an iteration. While working code is a measure of progress, and provides a tool to validate success, it is not always your best investment. Your best investment lies in combining 1) what helps you learn about your product and your market and 2) what you need to do to deliver it, and what is constraining either of these.
Redesigning Agility: Incorporating Design Thinking
Design tends to mean one thing to developers and another thing to designers. The later group are product designers and are not aware of the structure of the code.
The hipsters in the agile community are trying to blend product design into the process of coding and delivering software. This session discusses what to do after your agility is flowing, or post agilism: imagine you using agile methods successfully, what's next?
Coaching Agility into Organizations: Success over Dogma
If you want to introduce meaningful agility in your company, real change takes more than a few certification courses or one successful pilot project. Process that produces tangible results sticks while dogmatic preaching is short lived. If you are planning to grow agility that helps you produce better products and better code in meaningful timeframes, stop in and learn how to succeed and how to avoid common failures.