Here are the full abstracts for my two official Javapolis conference sessions...

UNI: (Monday 10 December) The Zen of Agile Management

What is the essence of agile management? How do you create a culture of continuous improvement? With light touch, empowerment, delegation, high levels of trust, and focus on the correct leverage point to drive maximum advantage. Learn the Zen of agile management! A set of techniques developed by David J. Anderson over the last 8 years through his experience managing teams at Fortune 100 companies such as Motorola and Sprint using Feature Driven Development, Microsoft Solutions Framework (and Team Foundation Server) and his latest work at Corbis using Lean ideas such as kanban. This half-day workshop dives into the heart of how to manage with queues using kanban boards, cumulative flow diagrams and application of wider ideas in management science, to software development process. Through David’s experience as senior director of the software engineering function at Bill Gates’ private company, Corbis, you will learn how to scale Agile and Lean techniques enterprise-wide.

CONF: (Friday 14 December) A Kanban System for Software Engineering

Ideas from Lean Thinking have been growing in popularity with the Agile software development community. Over the past year, the use of kanban (literally signal cards) popular in manufacturing has been seen as the significant innovation in managing agile work and is growing in adoption at firms such as Yahoo! David Anderson introduced the first electronic kanban system at Microsoft in 2004 and has since extended the technique through his work at Corbis. Kanban acts to limit work-in-progress and focus the team on achieving a continuous flow of value to the customer. Kanban innovates on accepted agile management practice by providing an iteration-less process with a regular release cadence. It helps achieve a balance of demand against capacity on the team and eliminate multi-tasking. David will present a brief history of the technique through case study reports from teams at Microsoft and Corbis. The kanban system enables David to deliver on his Recipe for Success: focus on quality; reduce work-in-progress; balance demand against throughput; and prioritize. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Javapolis, Kanban, Software+Engineering