Agile At Heart

#SoftwarePassion Conference

I was asked to speak at Software Passion Summit after a friend and colleague of mine, Portia Tung, was unable to make it. This was my first time speaking at a conference 🙂

Software Passion Summit

When: 19th March 2012, 2 days
Where: Göteborg, Sweden.

Description

Software Passion Summit is a developer conference with a passion for software development. The Software Passion Summit is going to be held the 19-20th of march 2012 at the Clarion Hotel Post in Göteborg, Sweden. The Software Passion Summit is a gathering of software professionals from every part of Scandinavia and the world. As software has become more pervasive and important as well as more complex and challenging, there is a growing need for software professionals to come together, meet, and exchange ideas. This conference will provide attendees with valuable opportunities to learn new skills and techniques, discover the latest innovations in software tools and technologies, share best practices, and network and build new relationships with other highly motivated software professionals.
We have created this technologically open conference to support the developer community in Scandinavia to develop their skills and create new innovations. This conference will cover multiple topics in software development such as: software platforms, development techniques, new languages, frameworks, and future directions. Specific topics include: cloud computing, Mobile and Web development, testing, and security. The conference will cover platforms from Java and .NET to IBMi and many others.
While the technology forms the core of the conference, we do more than just work at the Software Passion Summit. The evening before the conference there will be a welcome dinner and the evening of the first day we will have a cocktail reception for all attendees where we can exchange ideas and discuss challenges that we face in an informal setting. This is a conference designed to support your passion for software.

(Source)

My talk was on using an economic framework for prioritization, using cost of delay.

Commentary and Feedback

Zsolt Fabok wrote a nice overview of the conference.  In particular, his conclusion about the focus of the conference was spot on:

I was really happy to see that speakers talked about the product and value and not about methodologies and techniques. Nobody – at least nobody I was listening to – wanted to sell Scrum or Kanban, because these don’t matter. The goal is to deliver usable product and not to implement a methodology.

Björn Tikkanen also blogged a nice summary of my talk:

Introducing an economic framework to prioritization – Özlem Yüce

The last session of the day felt like a fresh wind, with a lot of focus on numbers and money. Real things and less emotions than many of the other topics, or atleast it felt like this. Özlem talked about how Maersk uses a process for prioritization that is built on risk, time to market and reward.

“We want to fill the development pipeline with the most profitable ideas”. Don’t just do things, do the things that leads to some value for the company. This means “putting a pricetag on time : cost of delay”.

The different benefits to look at are :

Increase Revenue; Protect Revenue; Reduce Costs; and, Avoid Costs.

I feel myself that we don’t look at all these four very much.

Ozlem also talked about the method of CD3, Cost of Delay Divided by Duration as a measure for what to do next.

A good way to keep it agile is to “split the benefits, release continuously and look at the dollars”. A nice side effect of their work with these methods is that they “went from yelling and screaming to looking at pure data (dollars) in their prioritisation meetings”.

There were also a few comments made on Twitter:

 

 

Özlem

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