Octav Druta is an entrepreneur with a technology background spiced up with a high interest in interdisciplinarity. He’s an idealist, a music freak and he pursues his ideas ambitiously. His latest startup, Trigwee, empowers creatives from all over the world to connect around ideas that inspire them to be happy. http://www.octavdruta.com

Presentation

Entrepreneur, Test Infected Software Developer. I have been working as a software developer and Linux server administrator starting from the first year of college.I am mainly interested in server side programming but I am open to any challenge.

I like to work with smart people in small teams that want to do things The Right Way. I don’t like to cut corners when I speak about software because I realized that most of the time I will just make my life more complicated.

Websites: http://andreisavu.ro/, http://indekspot.com/

Presentations:

20 years’ experience as entrepreneur including 9 years in online market.

http://vladstan.com/

Self-taught software developer with four years experience, mainly in web related fields. My latest interests include test-driven development, functional programming and programming language design.

I’m currently working for MediaCafé, an online advertising company located in Bucharest, Romania.

Presentations:

Paul Klipp is a seasoned expert in agile software development and outsourcing.

Paul serves as President and scrum Coach at Lunar Logic Polska in Central Europe. He started Lunar Logic’s project management department and assisted with the development and implementation of the company’s overall growth strategy.

Paul earned his MBA from the University of Illinois specializing in international business, and completed post-graduate coursework on Management of Technology in South Africa as a student of the University of Warwick (UK) EngD Doctorate program.

Since 1998, he has managed technology projects on three continents with teams ranging from 2 to 250 developers. He participated in the design of the selection criteria for the Technology Top 100 Awards (www.tt100.co.za) and sat for two years on the award’s adjudicating panel.

Over the years, he has been invited to speak and consult around the world on various issues related to maximizing the business value of emerging technologies and has taught and coached agile development and project management.

Paul became a Certified ScrumMaster in 2006 and a Certified Scrum Practitioner in 2009.

Paul is the founder of Lunar Logic Polska, AgileActivist Consulting, the Krakow Ruby Users Group, AgileKrakow, AgilePoland.com, rubyusers.com, OpenCoffee Krakow, and the IT Small Business Alliance. He was the main organizer of the first AgileCE conference in April 2010.

You can find more about Paul on http://www.paulklipp.com/

Rachel Davies – Coaching Agile Teams

You want to guide your team become more Agile and learn how to get the best from powerful new practices, such as Test-Driven Development and User Stories. It’s not a simple task; new habits take time to develop and change can feel uncomfortable. Come to this talk to learn practical tips about you can encourage your team to let go of their old ways and start collaborating more closely.

David Hussman – Products and People over Process and Dogma

The time has come to shift our focus away from process to products and people. 10 years into the agile movement, the fresh, lightweight process once created are gaining weight and often calcifying to a dangerous degree.  Where meaningful and lasting agility thrives, agile practices are powerful tools but not the focus of daily discussion.

Real value flows as development agility augments design thinking to continually discover your product context: users, use and market. From design thinking to lean start-ups to the value of simple checklists, this talk will challenge you to stop focusing on improving your process and start focusing on improving your product. Come ready to think, question and rethink your use of agile practices.

Janet Gregory – Lessons Learned Implementing Agile: From a Tester’s Perspective

Many teams have tried to implement agile software development practices and failed. When you read about transitioning to agile development, it sounds so easy. Why don’t all of them succeed and why do so many agile adoptions go so badly?

In particular, testing seems to get off track. Iterations turn into mini-waterfalls, stories are never quite “done”, and testers worry that they’re losing control or being set up to fail. Customers keep changing their minds and complaining that their requirements weren’t met. Obviously, some teams succeed with agile. What do they do differently?

Janet Gregory will share some of the lessons she has learned when working with teams that help agile teams be successful. She will talk about what to avoid, what practices are critical, and some basic steps that can make the difference between success and failure. One example of a critical practice is using the whole team approach, and what happens when your team keeps your test team separate from the project team.

Discussion after each lesson will take real examples from participants and talk about how they could be handled, or if they solved the problem, discuss how and what worked.

Michel Goldenberg – Product Owner Tolls for maximizing ROI

As we know, one of the product owner responsibilities is to maximize the ROI (Return On Investment)! One way to maximize the ROI in to have a high team velocity, but does the PO knows how he can help the team to do it? Another way is to find the Stories who will give him a high ROI and priories them. We all know that 20% of the Stories will bring 80% of the business value.
So if we go faster, and if we do the right thinks first we should get the right Product in 25% or 20% of the budget that we was thinking to invest!
Let see how we can do that! Let learn why a PO is a PIG, and how he should act in his team member role.

Vlad Stan – Lessons learned in Sillicon Valley

Online entrepreneur and angel investor, Vlad Stan will discuss the increases in productivity he noticed in Sillicon Valley due to applying lean business and agile principles.

Ciprian Stăvar – Lessons Learned Implementing Agile: From a Product Owner’s Perspective

Ciprian Stăvar’s presentation, based on experience with the application of Scrum in a company developing a web portal, will reveal the barriers that stood in the way of successful implementation and how they were removed. In fact, the presentation will be almost an hour long interactive training that will teach active listening techniques, essential to a successful application of Scrum.

Among the topics discussed will be issues such as the role of the three questions and how to move from formalism to exceptional results, Sprint planning, how obstacles, that slow the team down, can be surpassed on the road to performance.

This talk will be presented in Romanian.

Paul Klipp – Five months with kanban, an experience report

I was intrigued by the ideas presented in Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s wonderful book, Lean Software Development, which was published nearly seven years ago, but it wasn’t until I came across the first articles describing kanban that I fully appreciated the practical implications of a lean approach to software development. In this presentation, I will share the lessons learned from my experience learning to work with kanban on three very different projects. I will talk about adoption strategies, growing pains, implementation tips, and my teams’ current thinking about future ideas to further refine our processes.

Robert Dempsey – Agile Teams Lead Business Innovation

Terms like self-managing and self-organizing can often scare managers into a belief that Agile teams do what they want when they want. These terms really mean that Agile teams are empowered to come up with their own solutions to a given business problem being solved by the software they are creating. Innovation is defined on Wikipedia as, “a change in the thought process for doing something or ‘new stuff that is made useful,’ and may refer to an incremental emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.”
Agile teams are formed to be able to respond to changes in the business environment, and develop software with emergent requirements. In today’s global business environment it is absolutely critical that businesses develop this capability. The Agile team lies at the heart of this business capability.
In this session we’ll look at how to foster innovation within Agile teams using techniques from Agile coaching along with simple psychology. We’ll also address common issues that management typically has with empowering Agile teams to innovate so you can break down those barriers. Anyone interested in improving their team is urged to attend and share their experience with the group.

Radu Ticiu – The Struggle of Agile Persuasion

Startups’ early periods are extremely demanding for the founders. As founder, one have to build own and their team’s discipline. To design and implement working relationships, company’s style, identity and future uniqueness.  All this while running administrative tasks, identifying and serving customers, refining and pivoting products or services. It is, undisputable, an exhausting day by day exercise that have to be practiced nurturing and following the initial guiding vision. How this list of individualy apparent easy to manage activities could benefit from embracing the agile approach? How the practices of agile programming are transgressing in practices of agile starting up a business? Which are the ways a startup-support organization builds awareness and works towards agile adoption within its inner ecosystem? Which are the direct and collateral benefits for the individual incubated companies and for the local software development community?

I’ll expose Timisoara Software Business Incubator’s less than a year long but multifaceted road trip in the Agile world, the lessons learned and the questions that are still open.

http://prezi.com/yqhxpwhqz3kd/the-struggle-for-agile-persuasion/

Iulia Rusu – Lessons Learned in Large, Outsourced Agile Project

Based on the experience we have facing the different kind of  problems during our offshoring history (4 years), I will present our model of working regarding this Healthcare project. Some of the topics covered are: team communication and motivational patterns, data gathering and metrics, psychological impact on team members and customers.

In the end, I would like to present our improvement strategies regarding the  project itself, resource management, with the goal of maintaining a long term offshoring relationship.

Daniel Nicolescu – The Agile methodology for cross-functional teams

When it comes to deal with different interests that need to go in the same direction using an Agile style, definitely you are facing many challenges. Some of them are predictable but some others are not. Learn from real experiences and discover great tips for an effective Agile implementation, productivity and an functional communication across the team.

The presentation addresses the current challenges of product leaders and it unveils key development aspects great results – from learning to say “NO” to building a cross-functional product team, from building a great product story and promoting like hell to communicate, communicate, communicate, plus a study case with the challenges and the way we did it.

Ionut G. Stan & Andrei Savu – TDD Performance Kata

Ionut & Andrei, two active members of the Romanian Software Craftsmanship community will demonstrate how to solve a problem using TDD and pair programming on stage. This is a highly technical demonstration, but it also shows some elements of thinking incrementally and iteratively – something needed for the development of any product.

Alexandru Bolboaca & Maria Diaconu- Software Development = Learning

From our experience working with teams we realized that developing a software product (and a business around it) actually means learning: about the market, about the users, about the functionalities, about the technologies, about the solutions, about the team… There are some very interesting implications for software development if we look at development from this perspective. We’re going to share our insight on the topic, and hopefully gather some interesting ideas from the audience as well.

Lightning talks

These are very short talks, 5 minutes maximum, that anyone can submit and perform. The current list is the following, but it’s still open:

Ionut G. Stan – “Functional Programming. What it is and how we can take advantage of it”

Andrei Savu – 10 Things I’ve learned

Octav Druță – Octav will give a talk on Rodeo. He’ll show you why cowboys have a lot in common with tech entrepreneurs and why this perspective can offer you useful insights for building successful projects business wise as well as technology wise.

Rachel Davies – Retrospectives

Alexandru worked in software development for more than 10 years, both locally and abroad. He is currently a Software development consultant and trainer working in partnership with Mosaic Works, helping customers develop high quality software and working to improve the quality of the software developed in Romania. He studied in the recent years the influence of human factor in software development and continues to work to find ways to improve the software quality. He is an active promoter of the Software Craftsmanship movement in Romania.

Maria is founder and coordinator of the Romanian Agile community Agile Works Romania and owner of Mosaic Works, a company offering coaching and training services in software development area. From Software Developer to Agile Practitioner & Coach, Maria is supporting quality software, software craftsmanship and people passionate about their craft. In the last 5 years she is working with teams to achieve high quality software and increase their productivity. She is also an active promoter of the Software Craftsmanship movement in Romania.

After working as a developer for a few years, Iulia started to focus on Quality Management. Being a Quality Manager at Siemens since 2004, she is responsible for assuring the quality of the software products created in her department using:

• Agile: Scrum
• Siemens System Development Method – SEM
• Rational Unified Process (RUP).

During the 9 years of working experience, Iulia was part of different teams including members from : France, Austria, USA, Russia and Germany.

Iulia is a Certified Scrum Master and she is coordinationg the Scrum Master Skill Center in her department. She helped starting and organizing the AgileWorks Brasov meetings having Maria Diaconu and Alexandru Bolboaca involved. She is also an active Scrum Master.

Preparing the Acceptance documentation and making the presentation for different customers, organizing and moderating lessons learned workshops and meetings has help her understand how important is a good communication level.