AgileScotland: Three announcements

Hi everyone,

 

Three points:

 

1.  Next week, Linda Rising will be giving one of her most entertaining and highly regarded talks from the Agile2006 conference.  It's this coming Monday evening (21st of April) at the Apex Hotel in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh, starting at 7:15pm.  Don't forget to bring along your copy of her book for signing.  Please send me an email if you'd like to come along.   

 

Linda Rising: Are Agilists the Bonobos of Software Development?

 

The chimpanzees and the bonobos are the animals whose genetic make-up is closest to that of human beings, but their "cultures" (and, yes, these animals definitely have well-defined cultures) are very different. The chimpanzees are aggressive, and operate in a strict, alpha-male-dominated hierarchy, while the bonobos are gentle and promiscuous! What sort of tie-could this have for those of us who favor agile development over plan-driven?

 

Bio
Linda Rising is an independent software consultant with a background in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in object-based design metrics. A proponent of patterns and their application in the workplace, Linda and Mary Lynn Manns are the authors of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, and editor of Design Patterns in Communications Software, The Pattern Almanac 2000, and The Patterns Handbook.

 

 

2.  Congratulations to the organizers of the Scotland on Rails conference.  It was very, very well attended and all of the feedback I heard was excellent.  Well done for all the hard work lads!

 

3.  Let me be immodest and congratulate myself!  My business novel "Rolling Rocks Downhill - Lean and Agile software development for ordinary people with extra-ordinary ambitions" has just been accepted for publication by none other than The Pragmatic Programmers!  I am very proud to join such highly esteemed company. I will share some of the ideas from my book in May's agileScotland meeting during a session titled "Extremely Profitable Programming with COBOL" - it's about an agile project I ran last year using where we saved one companies reputation and made another company tens of millions of pounds in extra profit. 

 

[Blatant, but rare, commercialism: now that the book is under control ... I am, once again, available for short term consulting work.  My focus, if you haven't already guessed, is helping ordinary people working in ordinary organisatons can use Agile, Lean and Theory of Constraints to make loads more money by pushing out more software projects, faster.]

 

In celebration of my "publishing deal", I'll buy pizza and beer for everyone too.  More details to follow. 

 

Thanks everyone,

Clarke Ching

www.clarkeching.com

079 2011 4893.