Mark Your Calendars for #AATC2017, April 19-21 in Boston
by bab
Added to The Alliance
It is our pleasure to announce the upcoming Agile Alliance Technical Conference, AATC2017, which will take place in Boston, MA on April 19-21. We're at the very start of planning this conference but we — your conference chairs Craig Smith and Brian Button — intend to post frequently about the progress being made towards opening day in mid-April, only 160 or so short days away.
Some of the things we plan on accomplishing very soon are publishing our vision for the theme for this year's conference (see below!), finalizing our Program Team, and beginning to solicit talks for this year's program. Like last year, all of our sessions and workshops will be delivered by invited speakers and their duration will be either 45 or 90 minutes. A strong preference will be given to hands-on activities.
Getting to Our Vision
In coming up with the vision and theme for this year's conference, we did a lot of talking about where our industry is now versus where it was when Extreme Programming first set our world afire in 1995 or so. The Agile world was mostly developer-focused then, and our practices reflected that. In looking at where we are now, it's very apparent that everything about our industry has grown. Instead of being strongly developer-focused, we now have a much bigger tent that encompasses a half dozen roles or more. We also cover a much wider range of technology, systems, and scale.
That realization led directly to our vision — to explore the emerging and growing set of Agile practices used by practitioners of every type to deliver value to our customers. This allows us to open our tent to new audiences beyond developers and testers, creating a larger sense of community throughout all involved in system creation.
And with that, I give you our vision for #AATC2017:
AATC2017 Vision Statement
The Agile Alliance Technical Conference is focused on exploring the emerging and growing set of Agile Engineering practices. Initially very developer-focused, we have grown into a multi-disciplinary field that now includes practices from operations, testing, data science and infrastructure/cloud engineering.
New challenges and new directions need new tools and techniques, and new patterns and practices. AATC2017 will provide a space for practitioners in all involved fields to gather, present, and discuss new advances, learn from experts, and practice our craft together while exploring topics such as:
New and updated core development practices
Integration of user experience principles
Advances in testing practices and automation
Evolution of tools and techniques that bridge development, deployment, and operations
Growing importance of Big Data across the entire spectrum of activities
#aatc2017
While cultural changes are equally important, we'll leave those discussions for our larger conference, Agile20XX. Here we focus on the doing, the building, and the creating.
Brian Button
Brian Button is the Vice President of Engineering for Acertus in St. Louis. His organization is responsible for the online presence of Acertus as well as the internal advanced technology projects.
Prior to that, Brian began his career 30 years ago as a hardcore C/C++ dev on SunOS, building and delivering solutions in many languages and operating systems. He has worked in embedded systems, navigation software, mission control applications for NASA, and other interesting areas during his career. Eventually moving into Agile consulting and coaching, Brian traveled the Western world helping organizations learn better ways of developing software. He was instrumental in introducing Agile and Extreme Programming to St. Louis and has been an active leader in the Agile and Extreme Programming conferences and community in the US since the early 2000s.
This is an Agile Alliance community blog post. Opinions represented are personal and belong solely to the author. They do not represent opinion or policy of Agile Alliance.