How an Expedite Request Sunk the Titanic - Speaker: Dan Vacanti

We’re pleased to announce that the first ExpertTalks in NYC will take place on September 8th.

Here’s what we have lined up for you:

Talk 1: How an Expedite Request Sunk the Titanic - Speaker: Dan Vacanti

Most people know that RMS Titanic was a British passenger ship that struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic on the morning of April 15, 1912 resulting in the loss of over 1,500 lives. What most people don’t know, however, is that during the final stages of construction of Titanic, an expedite request caused a delay in completion and triggered a chain of events that directly led to the sinking of the ill-fated vessel.

If this sounds all too familiar, that’s because delays due to expedite requests are sinking your process as well.

This talk will be an exploration of how disruptive interrupt requests – like expedites – can be to the normal flow of development work. Most people see these interrupts as innocuous, status quo, or even a necessary part of the product development process. Few people realize how negatively impactful these disruptions can be. In fact, for most teams, these interrupts are the number one cause for unpredictability. Using the Titanic disaster as a backdrop, this presentation will look at the negative consequences of expedite work. It will explore objective data from real teams that demonstrates how expedites actually make things take more time—not less—to complete. Chances are you have always intuitively known that interrupts are what makes your process unpredictable. This talk will give you to tools you need to quantify that impact and give you strategies on how minimize their negative effects.

Daniel Vacanti is a 20-year-plus software industry veteran who has spent most of his career focusing on Lean and Agile practices. In 2007, he helped to develop the Kanban Method for knowledge work, and managed the world’s first project implementation of Kanban that year. He has been conducting Lean-Agile training, coaching, and consulting ever since. In 2011 he founded ActionableAgile (previously Corporate Kanban), which provides industry-leading predictive analytics tools and services organizations that utilize Lean-Agile practices. In 2015 he published his book, Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability, which is the definitive guide to flow-based metrics and analytics. Daniel holds an M.B.A. and regularly teaches a class on lean principles for software management at the University of California Berkeley.

Talk 2: Architecting For Change – Speaker: Brian Blignaut

Architecting applications in today’s fast-changing world requires a different approach to system design. Applications must scale to meet the ever-increasing demands of users, and they must also be able to shift to meet changes in the business' direction – without requiring wholesale rewrites of the platform.

The rise of microservice architectures is one solution to this problem, but it’s never as simple as that suggests:

• Multiple consumers have different requirements, and sometimes conflicting requirements from your services

• Development and operations teams need up-to-date system information to diagnose system failure

• Conflicting budgetary requirements mean consumers evolve at their own pace

• To top it all off, the rise of mobile applications brings an upgrade path that is out of your control.

All these issues require developers to think about more than just the code, and look at the bigger picture.

In this talk, Brian – a Partner at Equal Experts – will present approaches and philosophies to overcome these problems, acquired from years of architecting service-based applications. He will also provide some metrics you can use to determine whether service-based architectures are appropriate for your own organization.

An interesting session guaranteed – we hope you can make it!

If you haven’t attended an ExpertTalks event before, expect an informal gathering of smart, switched-on people – discussing a wide variety of topics related to software development and delivery, best working practices and more.

We’ll provide food and drink, and there’ll be plenty of opportunity for questions and networking.

Hope to see you on September 8th.