Technical Discussion:
Heritage Modernisation, with a focus on Universe Systems
Wednesday 14 May 2014 @ 6.30 pm - 9 pm
HMS President
Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0HJ
Sponsors:
Refreshments Provided
Vince Ryan is a Senior Partners at Value Driven Software, a consultancy that applies pragmatic delivery techniques to deliver measurable change to businesses. VDS help teams deliver value quickly using iterative and incremental techniques.
ELKIE: The event being hosted what’s it all about and how does it fit in with MultiValue ?
VINCE: Over the course of the last 18 months, one of the MultiValue clients I have been working with has seen a massive improvement in their ability to deliver new functionality into what was previously seen as a bit of a black hole for requirements. Requests would just disappear into it, and engineers were afraid of working with it because nobody understood it completely. It was very fragile, to say the least.
ELKIE: Who is this event aimed at, what are you selling?
VINCE: Firstly we are not selling anything. This is a knowledge sharing session. It’s for everyone from CIOs to Developers. Anyone who has a firm belief in delivering high quality Universe / UniData in a more effective manner. We want to share knowledge of how we have successfully leveraged tools and techniques that are more commonly associated with objective-oriented programming languages.
ELKIE: What sort of tools and techniques are you referring to?
VINCE: The techniques are mostly taken from the Agile catalogue, with a heavy emphasis on the eXtreme Programming team and technical practices. For example; pair programming, test-driven development, release and iteration planning, continuous integration and delivery, devops, etc.
The tools are those that we’ve found to successfully enable us to support the techniques. Mostly open-source, they include Git, Jenkins as well as some Universe specific tools we’ve been using for test-driven development, both at unit and integration level.
ELKIE: Why should people come to the event?
VINCE: Free drinks !!! Seriously, Elkie, the story about the journey will be beneficial to any team / company wondering about doing something similar, learning about promises, pitfalls and potential ways of going about it. We’re big fans of learning and are more than happy to share our own knowledge.
ELKIE: This sounds like more than just technical change is that correct?
VINCE: Yes that’s correct. One of the keys to success with this type of approach is building an environment that supports change. This needs to be a management initiative! Without effective leadership nothing can change and so we also introduce techniques, like release and iteration planning, that management can use to help measure the effectiveness of the change.
ELKIE: Anything else that you would like share about the event?
VINCE: The session is all about sharing so, as I mentioned earlier, we will be providing refreshments for everyone.
For more information about this event, contact Vince Ryan on vince@valuedrivensoftware.com
Please note this is NOT a Prospectus event.
