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Ken Pugh

Net Objectives

A fellow consultant with Net Objectives, Ken Pugh helps companies transform into lean-agile organizations through training and coaching. His special interests are in communication (particularly effectively communicating requirements), delivering business value, and using lean principles to deliver high quality quickly. Ken trains, mentors, and testifies on technology topics from object-oriented design to Linux/Unix. He has written several programming books, including the 2006 Jolt Award winner Prefactoring and his latest Lean-Agile Acceptance Test Driven Development: Better Software Through Collaboration. Ken has helped clients from London to Boston to Sydney to Beijing to Hyderabad. He enjoys snowboarding, windsurfing, biking, and hiking the Appalachian Trail. Reach Ken at [email protected]

Speaker Presentations
Monday, November 11, 2013 - 8:30am
Half-day Tutorials
Design Patterns Explained: From Analysis through Implementation

Ken Pugh takes you beyond thinking of design patterns as “solutions to a problem in a context.” Patterns are really about handling variations in your problem domain while keeping code from becoming complex and difficult to maintain as the system evolves. Ken begins by describing the classic use of patterns. He shows how design patterns implement good coding practices and then explains key design patterns including Strategy, Bridge, Adapter, Façade, and Abstract Factory.

Monday, November 11, 2013 - 1:00pm
Half-day Tutorials
An Introduction to SAFe: The Scaled Agile Framework
NEW

Many organizations have achieved agility at the team level only to be unable to achieve it across teams. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) provides both a vision and method for how to achieve this. SAFe is the first documented framework that can be used to scale agile throughout an organization. It is a combination of lean, kanban, and Scrum—lean to provide a context for an organization, kanban to manage the flow of projects, and Scrum to provide agile at the team level. Beginning with an introduction to lean and kanban, Ken Pugh explains why they are required for agile at scale.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - 8:30am
Half-day Tutorials
Eight Steps to Kanban

Because transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often wrenching—for teams, many organizations are turning to kanban practices. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual evolution to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - 2:15pm
Projects & Teams
Managing Multiple Teams at Scale with Scrum and Lean

Scrum has become very popular in agile development shops, but most organizations that adopt Scrum run into challenges when they expand beyond a few teams. Ken Paugh believes that you can overcome the challenging patterns of scaling Scrum by focusing on lean-flow (removing delays between the steps of a development organization’s workflow). Ken begins by discussing how cross-functional teams are a manifestation of the lean mantra of removing delays. He discusses ways to manage projects spanning multiple teams, including creating teams that don’t meet the definition of classic Scrum.

Thursday, November 14, 2013 - 2:15pm
Design & Code
Avoiding Overdesign and Underdesign

The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging one.  Too much design often results in overkill, complexity, and wasted effort. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that require later rework, additional complexity, and wasted effort.  How can we know what the right balance is? Ken Pugh shows how to use advice taken from Design Patterns, coupled with the attitude of not building what you don’t need from agile.