Andrea Provaglio – Trainer & Agile Coach

Andrea Provaglio is an independent professional with over twenty years of experience in the field of Information Technology. He assists clients from many different domains, which can range from large organizations such as the European Commission in Brussels, or large multinational banks, to small and dynamic IT companies.His mission is to help his clients to develop better software and to create better development teams; and to help the individuals to improve technically and relationally. Andrea’s contribution to his clients is primarily in the areas of: Adoption of Agile methodologies; Development of soft skills for teams and organizations; Design and development of Web/Enterprise applications. Andrea is frequently a speaker at international IT conferences and contributed to a few books and publications.

Alexandru Bolboaca - Trainer & Technical Coach

I’ve never imagined myself doing something other than software development. I’ve always wanted to understand and to learn more about how it’s done and especially about how we can do it better. I was lucky enough to have mentors in my early career that slapped my hand whenever I did something wrong. I have thus learned each year more and more about the discipline and craft required for developing good and successful software products.
You can read the rest of the story on my website.

Facts about me:

• More than 12 years experience in software development
• Worked with small, medium and large companies from more than 5 countries, including: UK, Switzerland, France, US, Belgium and Romania
• Developed software for more than 5 industries, including: banking, energy, telecommunications, media planning, printing, eHealth
• Had the roles of: Software developer, team leader, technical lead, project manager, software architect, independent consultant, technical coach, technical trainer and was also exposed to business ideas from the startup community and from my collaboration with Mosaic Works
• Spoke at conferences: Agile Eastern Europe, Agile Central Europe, Open Agile Romania, Web Expo, HowToWeb, OWASP etc.
• Active in local and international communities – the Romanian Agile Community, the Software Craftsmanship community etc. – details available on www.agileworks.ro
• Had unique opportunities of learning with JB Rainsberger, Corey Haines, Janet Gregory, David Hussman and other experienced and famous people from the industry
• One of my best accomplishment is coaching a few teams to allow them to deploy a new completely tested feature every 2-3 days, at a sustainable pace
• Research activity: me and Maria Diaconu tried to understand what we’re really doing when developing software and found one idea: it’s all about information.

Richard Stinear

Richard is a keen programmer and software architect, and works as the Head of Development for Endava. By day he helps shape Agile projects for some of the world’s largest financial services customers, by night he enjoys quality geek time and engineering hearty meals. Thanks to his New Zealand heritage he feels his passion for rugby gives him an instant affinity to Scrum – be warned, his talks are likely to contain tenuous references to the All Blacks.

Stefan Bargaoanu

An internal agile coach turning professional, Stefan has been training, coaching and mentoring agile teams in his own company since 2008. His journey to Agile has been a very personal and transformative one and after experiencing the “power and simplicity of Agile done well”, he decided to assist others on the same path, toward personal fulfillment and high performance.

In the software industry since 1998, Stefan has founded and is active in the local Agile community of practice in his hometown of Iasi. He holds double certifications: Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) and Project Management Professional (PMP).

Ionel Condor

Ionel Condor is a passionate software professional working in this industry since 1998.
He likes to read & promote good engineering practices, clean code, scalable solutions, all driven by self-org teams that continuously improve their abilities and skills.

About Ionel:

He worked with many teams spread across multiple countries and from the early days of his career he has been involved in all the aspects of building and growing teams.

He truly believes that a technical manager needs to keep in touch with both technology and management trends, so he is actively involved as founder and contributor to a local JUG, a local meet up group, likes to read and review books and also to blog and tweet about growing software teams.

He is currently involved as an Engineering Manager for SDL Language Technologies, based in Cluj, Romania.
Ionel is married and has a 2 years daughter. He likes Italian music, medicine and evangelical theology.

Carmen Munteanu – Agile Coach

Four years ago I was seduced by Agile and from that moment I devoted myself to learn how to coach teams adopting it and be more productive. Since the beginning of 2011 I became internal coach helping different teams on their journey towards Agility.

Working in the industry of developing software for telecom for the past 15 years I have seen the need, I have seen the benefits and I am convinced Agile is the right path.

For me is important to share my experiences and therefore I am joining Agile communities in my hometown, my country or elsewhere. Agile is of big interest for me, and so is my family and my cat.

After finishing his studies he started Stagii pe Bune, the oldest and still the biggest IT-focused internship program in Romania and Conectoo, an email marketing platform targeting online publishers.

In 2009 he started How to Web, helping Eastern European entrepreneurs find the inspiration, connections and knowledge they need for developing their businesses. The first international edition of How to Web won the IDG’s “Best Romanian IT&C event of the year” award.

Bogdan holds a degree in Engineering from the Computer Science department of theUniversity “Politehnica” of Bucharest and also a DEA degree from the University “Lumiere” of Lyon.

Topic: Eastern Europe’s hacker culture

Almost Every time I present myself to a tech guy from UK or Germany as Romanian, the next line is “Romania ! Wow, you’ve got great programmers !”. However, I’ve never heard somebody saying “Romania ! Wow, you’ve got great entrepreneurs !” Why are we good programmers ? What are the values and the causes that have made Eastern Europe an outsourcing destination, rather than an intellectual property creator ?

Topic: Looking Outside the Scrum – Building Cross-Organisational Teams

The success of an Agile project depends on much more than a finely tuned scrum. The way in which customers contribute to the Agile process, the relationships they have with the scrum, and the way the scrum understands and responds to the customer’s needs implies a team structure far beyond that of a standard delivery team.

Richard uses his experience building distributed scrums for the enterprise to examine concepts such as business strategy, software design, and operational support and how it applies when developing software in large organisations, and how the concept of teamwork is just as important outside the scrum as it is inside.

Because of that he tries to make use of his developer and designer skills as much as possible and generally talk his way out of trouble.  When not at work you may find him spending time with his family, doing a bit of work-out, reading a good comic book or watching a smart TED presentation.

Topic: The Pain of Doing Scrum

Some of you may have experienced resistance within your organization while migrating to Agile. Sometimes it may just be normal everyday resistance-to-change-of-any-kind syndrome, but sometimes it feels like there is something special about this type of methodologies, which frightens management and teams alike.

What if there are a lot of issues and a lot of resistance.Is there a panacea to heal all of these hurts or should one find specialized treatment for each symptom? Are good practices enough to keep the reform fueled at the time when the going inherently gets rough? And ultimately is it worth all the pain?

In this short presentation we will try to go over these questions and some of the real-life pains and hurts experienced by an organization putting in practice an apparently simple thing like Scrum.

Johan  was responsible for the Program Ventouris, the biggest J2EE project (30 manyear) in the Benelux that has been developed following the agile development approach. The Ventouris project is a development of a complex administrative application that as a product need to be used by 8 different customers, each customer with the same mission but different in size and different in internal business processes.

He has been speaker at Javapolis 2005, 2006 with as presentation topic : lessons learned of applying agile development practices on a large project ‘ Ventouris’, and in 2007 on ‘customer collaboration’ – the BMW case. He has been speaker on the XP-days.

The agile development approach has been introduced within Cegeka on Ventouris in 2005. Today Cegeka is using scrum & XP practices on all are projects with as result delighted customers, getting the system they really want within the agreed budget and timing. Recently they started working with distributed teams in Romania.

Today Johan is the chairman of the Belgium Chapter of the Agile Consortium see www.agileconsortium.be

Learn more info about www.cegeka.be

Topic: Turning IT into Strategic Advantage

The presentation is a real project story of Ventouris. Ventouris is one of the biggest J2EE software development projects in Belgium (30.000 mandays – 4 years). The Ventouris product is a custom build software for 8 customers all responsible for the social security administration of the self-employed people in Belgium.

Cegeka took this project as an opportunity to move from RUP methodology towards Agile Methodology. We will explain the reasons why this move was a good risk mitigation and how we applied all the scrum and XP practices on a large scale.

Today this software product Ventouris is already 3 years in production and we have very satisfied customers which receives a new release every 2 weeks. The software team is using for the maintenance also Kanban best practices to manage this. Last year we worked on, Ventouris in a distributed scrum team with Romania – also this topic will be covered.