XPColumbus

Meeting Info: Agile2006 Conference Report

The meeting will be held on Oct. 25th at OCLC in the Smith Private Dining Room from 11:30am to 1pm. Please mark this date on your calendars. You can bring your lunch or purchase lunch in the OCLC cafeteria. To register for this meeting, send email to lfarrenkopf@earthlink.net. For directions to OCLC, please visit our website at www.cardinalsolutions.com/XP

Directions to OCLC

Topic Summary:

1. Introduction: what, where and structure of conference
2. Trends at the conference: using agile methodologies in large companies & in waterfall environments
3. Agile methodologies represented at the conference
4. Presentations/facts/sound bytes of most interest to me

About the Speakers:

Rick Neighbarger, Director of Requirements and Testing at Nationwide Services Corporation, has over 17 years of experience in the IT industry. He has served as a software methodology advisor, requirements lead, QA/Testing manager, ISO 9001 lead auditor, network engineer and technical writer at organizations such as Nationwide Insurance, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, and Banc One. He has worked with software development organizations to implement waterfall as well as agile methodologies, including Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), eXtreme Programming, Scrum and ThoughtWorks Agile. Rick is an ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer and a QAI Certified Software Quality Analyst.

George Walter is the Director of Architecture and Standards at OCLC, Online Computer Library Center, Inc. OCLC, a nonprofit membership organization, serves 41,000 libraries in 82 countries and territories around the world. George joined OCLC in 1984 as a Quality Analyst and over the last 22 years has held various positions within the organization as a manager, a software engineer and a quality engineer. In his current role as Director of Architecture and Standards, George directs the Software Quality Department, Enterprise Architecture Services, and the Organizational Performance Management function to ensure the ongoing integrity, adequacy, and appropriateness of the corporate quality management system, the process management and improvement program, and independent software testing. Prior to joining OCLC, he was employed by Bank One in Westerville, Ohio and Anacomp, Inc. in Sarasota, Florida. George received his Bachelor of Science degree in management information systems from Ball State University.