OOPSLA 2006 Workshop
"Beyond the Project Myth - Agile Development and Product Environments"
Sunday, October 16th 2005, 8:30 - 17:00
San Diego, California, USA

Jens Coldewey

Coldewey Consulting

Toni-Schmid-Str. 10 b

D-81825 München

Germany

Tel: +49 (700) 26533939

Fax: +49 (89) 74995703

jens_coldewey@acm.org

http://www.coldewey.com

Martin Lippert

it-agile GmbH

Burchardstraße 17

20095 Hamburg

Germany

lippert@acm.org

http://www.martinlippert.com

Klaus Marquardt

Dräger Medical AG

Moislinger Allee 53-55

D-23542 Lübeck

Germany

Tel: +49 (451) 882-3314

marquardt@acm.org

http://www.kmarquardt.de

Extended Deadline: September 29th: Position Papers due (see How to Attend)
Abstract

The Principles of the Agile Manifesto state that "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software". An Agile Team concentrates on delivering value to the customers. On the other hand software development follows a project metaphor traditionally: Success means to deliver funtionality within time, budget, and quality - and according to studies most projects still "fail", in contrast to the success of software in our world.

An interesting alternative to the project metaphor is an environment in which success is measured based on the return on investment the effort provides over the complete life cycle - a common view in many product environments. This approach solves many issues of software development elegantly.

This sequel of last year's workshop on "The Customer Role in Agile Projects" aims at bringing practitioneers and academics of the project and the product world together to explore the consequences of focussing on the RoI during software development.

Contents and Objectives

One of the results of last year's OOPSLA workshop on the "The Customer Role in Agile Projects" was the insight that the objectives of agile development - to deliver value to the customer - fits much better to a standard product organization than to a traditional project organization. Aiming at the goals of a project, as there are features in time, in budget, and in quality, sometimes leads to compromises that significantly reduce the return on investment over the long term life cycle of the software. One example is to hit the well-visible time deadline on the expense of the hard-to-measure quality of the code. This makes perfect sense from a project perspective but may significantly increase the life cycle cost of the software. To optimize the RoI instead may lead to the same decision to reach time-to-market objectives, but balances this consciously with the cost poor quality may impose later. This is typical for product development organizations, regardless of whether they develop software products, chemical products, cars, or whatever.

Focussing on the RoI leads to a typical organization in which domain experts and technical experts work closely together and a thorough understanding of the market drives the development - both typical indications of agile software development. In addition these organizations have often developed a new culture of dealing with their suppliers far beyond fixed-price contracts.

This workshop aims at exploring how typical software and non-software organizations work and how this applies to (agile) software development. The workshop team will decide at the beginning of the workshop, whether it wishes to set additional objectives, such as a formal report.

Attendees

Every interested practitioner, consultant, teacher, academic, or otherwise interested person is invited to apply for attendance. We primarily seek submissions from people who have practical experience in product and in project evironments or have researched one of these issues.

How to Attend
Applicants (and Organizers!) need to submit a position statement no later than September 29th via email to: jens_coldewey@acm.org or lippert@acm.org. The position statement should be no longer than one page discussing an aspect relevant to the workshop topic. The authors will be notified about acceptance by September 4th, if their position paper was sent before August 29th, early enough to enjoy the reduced early bird rate for OOPSLA. The workshop will be limited to 20 persons.
watch the submissions grow here...
Workshop Format

The workshop is highly interactive, so the format will be an issue of the entire group. The following list is the suggestion of the organizers on how to proceed:

Final Report

The workshop attendees are supposed to agree on a format for the final report. Possible choices are e.g. a web page, a pattern collection, experience reports, or stories.

About the Organizers

Jens Coldewey (jens_coldewey@acm.org) is an independent consultant from Munich, Germany, specialized in deploying object-oriented techniques and agile development in large organizations. He was program chair of the EuroPLoP '98 conference, member of the program committee of the PLoP '98, PLoP '99, EuroPLoP '99, XP 2002 - 2003, Agile Development Conferece 2003, Agile 2005, OOPSLA 2003 and 2004 conferences. He cas co-organizer of a serious of workshops in past OOPSLAs, including the "Human Issues of Agile Processes" workshop at OOPSLA 2001, the "Commonalities of Agile Methodologies" workshop at OOPSLA 2002, the "Are Agile Methods Really Different" workshop at OOPSLA 2003, and the "Customer Role in Agile Projects" at OOPSLA 2004. He was board member of the Agile Alliance Non-Profit Organization between 2003 and 2005 and writes a regular column on Agile Development in ObjektSpektrum, the German SIGS/101 magazine on OO

Martin Lippert (lippert@acm.org) is a consultant and coach at it-agile GmbH, a german consulting company focused on agile software development. He is specialized in object-oriented techniques, refactoring and agile development. He is program committee member of the XP conference series since 2002, co-organizer of the OOPSLA 2003 and 2004 workshops on Ontologies in Software Engineering and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences on software engineering and agile development. He (co-)authored various magazine articles as well as books on extreme programming and refactoring in large software projects.

Klaus Marquardt (marquardt@acm.org) is a lead software architect at Dräger Medical in Lübeck, Germany. His published work covers modular, extensible software and system architectures, agile values in large organizations, and the working attitude of software architects. Klaus has co-organized various workshops at previous OOPSLA conferences on agile development and software architecture, and contributed to other conferences including EuroPLoP, OOP (Germany), OT (UK), VikingPLoP, and JAOO (Denmark). He is program chair of EuroPLoP 2004