Agile Denver will meet on Monday, June 23 this month. Our guest speaker
is Jean Tabaka from Rally Software. Jean will present "Attacking Waste
In Software: Three Practices We Must Embrace Now!"

One of the seven principles of Lean Thinking is "Eliminate Waste". This
principle focuses on adding value in all that we do in building
software. To explicitly attack waste in our work, we should first
consider lessons from the "Take-Make-Waste" model of 20th century
industry. Consider the automotive industry in the United States.

The total amount of resources and materials going into the making of a
car may result in as little 2% remaining as part of the final delivered
product. Such 98% bloat is unsustainable for the software industry of
the 21st century. To reduce that waste, we must aggressively embrace new
modes of value delivery that secure resources and apply them wisely and
efficiently in delivery value.

Jean Tabaka offers three pivotal practices that we must embrace if we
intend to aggressively attack waste in software delivery:

* provide software features in the form of a service (Software as a
Service, Saas)

* use Community to pull valuable, prioritized feature requests for these
services

* apply Agile Software Development in order to deliver requested
features into these environments

When software vendors and IT groups embrace these three practices, they
de facto eliminate waste. This is true not only within their
organizations. They in turn, ultimately, reduce waste that surrounds the
entire industry. And this in turn brings the industry into alignment
with the broad 21st century global view on managing scarce resources.

As always, our monthly meetings are free to attend and open to local
software professionals, students and faculty. Feel free to pass this
announcement along to your colleagues.

AGENDA

5:00 - 6:00 PM Refreshments, networking and announcements
6:00 - 7:30 PM Jean Tabaka Presentation

SPEAKER

Jean Tabaka is an Agile Coach with Rally Software Development in Boulder
Colorado. With over 25 years of experience in the software development
industry, she has navigated numerous plan-driven methodologies in a
variety of contexts (government, IT, consulting) and in a variety of
roles (programmer, architect, project manager, methodologist). Her move
to agile software development approaches came in the late 90's as a
result of studying DSDM in the UK. Since that time, she has become an
agile devotee, consulting with teams of all sizes worldwide wishing to
derive more value faster through the adoption of agile principles and
practices. She specializes in scaling agile practices, applying lean
principles and practices, and building continuous planning and testing
into organizations. She also creates a strong collaborative approach in
how organizations adopt agile.

Jean is a Certified ScrumMaster and Practitioner, a Certified
ScrumMaster Trainer, and a Certified Professional Facilitator. She holds
a Masters in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and is the
author of "Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software
Project Leaders" published in the Addison-Wesley Agile Software
Development Series.

SPONSORS

The June 2008 meeting sponsor is Rally Software. Rally helps
organizations perfect the art of software development through Agile and
Lean practices. Agile development practices are quickly becoming a
mainstream approach to software development because they shorten
development cycles, minimize risk and help better prioritize features
and customer requests. In fact, in a recent third-party study, Rally
customer BMC Software was proven to have development cycles that were
nearly three times faster than the industry average and one quarter the
expected number of defects with double the team size.

Our on campus sponsor is The Games Club, a tri-institutional (MSCD, UCD,
and CCD) club that seeks to unite the campus and provide a closer-knit
college community to Auraria Campus. The Funds raised by the games club
through sponsorship of events like Agile Denver is used to help fund
scholarships to club members and to encourage participation in the
Homeward Bound project.

DIRECTIONS

The meeting will be held in the Tivoli Student Union (TV) building, in
Room 440/540.

The Tivoli is located on the Auraria Campus, within walking distance of
Downtown Denver via Larimer Street crossing Speer. You can reach the
campus from the I-25 south Colfax or Speer exits.

Please review or print out the parking map for reference:

http://www.ahec.edu/parking/ParkingMap07color.jpg

Parking on site costs $5 to attendees of our event and there should be
parking available in the lots off of Auraria Parkway and Ninth Street.
Be sure to mention that you are attending an on campus event otherwise
they might assume you are there for a sports event.

A G I L E D E N V E R
www.agiledenver.org