ThoughtWorks' Experts Present Latest Advancements in Agile Development at JAOO 2010 Conference

CHICAGO, Oct. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- ThoughtWorks® (www.thoughtworks.com), the global custom software solutions experts and leaders in enterprise Agile software delivery, will have four of its leading Agile industry experts presenting topics pertinent to enterprise Agile success at the JAOO Conference this week in Denmark. The JAOO conference is one of the leading IT industry events in Europe for software developers, IT architects and project managers, and attracts more than 1,300 participants. Learn more at (http://jaoo.dk/).

Presentations include:

Jez Humble – Build and Release Principal, ThoughtWorks Studios

Continuous Delivery

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky and time-consuming process. This talk sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment and testing processes, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can reduce cycle times and improve the quality of software and the reliability of the release process.

Humble will introduce the value proposition of Continuous Delivery and the concept of the deployment pipeline, a pattern for modeling the delivery process that ensures everyone in delivery can self-service deployments and provide fast feedback on the production readiness of the software upon every change to its source or configuration. He will also discuss patterns for zero-downtime releases, and patterns for continuous development – keeping software production-ready in the face of change without the use of branches in version control.

Learn more about Continuous Delivery and Humble's book on the topic, visit: (www.continuousdelivery.com).

Martin Fowler – Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks

Neal Ford – Software Architect and Meme Wrangler, ThoughtWorks

Domain Specific Languages

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are an old technique in software development that's getting a recent resurgence in interest. Most developers run into them regularly – as XML configuration files, regular expressions, query languages or build scripts. However, they haven't been given the attention they deserve and there is very little information out there to help developers build them effectively. In fact, very few people have done much to build their own DSLs and even fewer have a broad appreciation of the various techniques involved.

During this tutorial, Fowler will provide a broad introduction to ways in which developers can build DSLs. He will explain the two main varieties of DSL today: internal and external, providing patterns to help build them and insight so attendees have the understanding needed to determine which of the two would be most suitable for future projects. He also will share with attendees the importance of building an underlying Semantic Model, and explain why DSLs are less important than one might think. By the end of the tutorial, participants will have an idea of where DSLs fit into the software development ecosystem. This material is based heavily on Fowler's upcoming book on DSLs. For more information visit: (http://martinfowler.com/books.html#dsl).

Tom Sulston – Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks UK

Continuous Deployment and DevOps: Deprecating Silos

In this session, Sulston will run a retrospective on how to break down organizational barriers with continuous deployment and other DevOps practices. He will talk about the role of tools and practices like CI and build pipelines, Puppet and Yum. He also will address some puzzles he has encountered during customer engagements, such as massive data deployments to global data centers, and replacing silos with cross-functional teams in complex, evolving environments.

Neal Ford – Software Architect and Meme Wrangler, ThoughtWorks

Rails in the Large: How Agility Allows Us to Build One of the Largest Rails Projects in the World

While others have been debating whether Rails can scale to enterprise levels, we've been demonstrating it. ThoughtWorks is running one of the largest Rails projects in the world, for an enterprise. This session discusses tactics, techniques, best practices and other things learned from scaling Rails development. Ford will discuss infrastructure, testing, messaging, optimization, performance and the results of lots of lessons learned, including killer rock-scissors-paper tricks to help practitioners avoid babysitting the view tests!

ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios continue to provide thought leadership, products, services and resources around the latest trends and methods in Agile. To learn more about ThoughtWorks new Build, Release, DevOps service offering, visit: (http://www.thoughtworks.com/services). For information on ThoughtWorks Studios' recently launched Continuous Delivery product, Go™, please visit: (http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/go-agile-release-management).

For information on any of these presentations please contact Christie Denniston at [email protected]

About ThoughtWorks

ThoughtWorks, Inc. is a global IT consultancy providing Agile-based systems development, consulting and transformation services to Global 1000 companies. It has pioneered many of the most advanced and successful Agile methods of software development and best practices used in the industry today. At its core, ThoughtWorks helps its clients maximize investment and performance across a portfolio of complex, business-critical applications, while reducing time and risk. Its products division, ThoughtWorks Studios, offers tools to manage the entire Agile development lifecycle through its Adaptive ALM solution®, comprised of Mingle®, Go™ and Twist®. ThoughtWorks employs 1,500 professionals to serve clients from offices in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. For more information please visit: (www.thoughtworks.com).

SOURCE ThoughtWorks