This wiki contains notes and proceedings from the Continuous Improvement Conference ("KaizenConf") held the Halloween weekend, 2008 (30 Oct 2008 - 2 Nov 2008) in Austin, Texas at the St. Edward's University Professional Education Center (PEC). [See Media from the event]

When you add your proceedings by creating a link to a new page, please put that page into the KaizenConf Austin 2008-10 folder. Also, you might consider using the Meeting template to help organize your notes.  Or not.

Agenda

Pre-Conference Workshops

Thursday, 30 October 2008

Workshop Opening

Morning Sessions, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM

• Advanced NHibernate - Ayende Rahien
• Introduction to Lua - Marcus Irven
• Behavior-Driven Development Chalk Talk - Scott Bellware

Afternoon Sessions, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

• Functional Programming - Is it a Game Changer? - Matt Podwysocki
• Textual DSLs in Boo - Ayende Rahien
• Domain-Driven Design Chalk Talk - David Laribee

Friday, October 31st

Morning Sessions, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM

• Using and Abusing ASP.NET MVC for Fun and Profit - Jeremy D. Miller and Chad Myers
• All About MEF (the Managed Extensibility Framework) - Glenn Block
• Driving Toward the Goal: Standard Work in Software Development - Jef Newsom

Afternoon Sessions, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

• Presentation Patterns: Going beyond MVP and Presentation Model - Jeremy D. Miller and Glenn Block
• Internal DSLs (fka Fluent APIs with C#)- Chad Myers
• Pull, Don’t Push: Lean Systems and Kanban - David Laribee

Saturday, 1 Nov 2008

9:30

• 103: Concurrent Set-Based Engineering / Design Storm!

   

• 104: Thinking Functionally (Functional Programming Languages)

  A discussion of the tenets of functional programming and how to take advantage of this paradigm.

   

• 105: Encouraging Change with Agile Examples

   

• 106: How to "Educate" customers & domain experts to adapt agile process

  In Switzerland and Germany agile development is not yet exercised by many .Net developer shops. Most of the companies still work according to the water fall model with a big upfront design. As a consequence customers are not accustomed to this methodology.

  The goal of this session was to get some answers on how to address problems faced during the communication with the customers and the domain experts.

• 107: Beyond Traditional Architecture - Saying Goodbye to RDBMS and Friends

   

• 213: One Pattern to Rule Them All

   

11:00

• 103: BDD - Focusing on experience and how to apply from high level to low

  How to use BDD to improve the experience of all customers of a piece of software. This includes the end user experience as well as developers attempting to modify the code. Attempting to elaborate more on statements that Scott Bellware made during his BDD Chalk Talk.

• 104: Rhino Tools / Producing Production Quality Software

  A dive into the projects around Rhino, and a bit of discussion of "building production ready applications"

   

• 105: Kanban Applications

  Discussing tools and software and processes for implementing kanban.

• 106: Lean Architecture

   

• 107: Building Better REST Architectures

   

• 213: Experimenting and Learning How to Fail (aka Failure in a Context of Experimentation)

  Creating a culture where experimenting is not only tolerated, but encouraged. Also, what does failure mean in this context?

BREAK/LUNCH 12:30 - 1:30

1:30

• 103: ESB Patterns & Implementation with MassTransit

  Last year there was a discovered need for a bus system. Rather than developing two proprietary messaging systems, work together to build a framework and open source it.

   

• 104: Open communication, Resistance to change, Going with the status quo with reference to the various roles on the team

  Discussion about team member empowerment and passion in organizational change.

   

• 105: Activity Modeling

  Modeling user activity/behavior from a UX persepctive

   

• 106: JIT'ing Retrospectives & Innovation Kanbans

   

• 107: Developer Ubiquitous Language

  How do we better communicate developer ideas outside the "echo chamber"

   

• 213: How to Achieve Hyper-Performant Agile Teams

3:00

• 103: Advanced IOC Beyond Constructor Injection

   

• 104: Applying Engineering Tools to the Build Process

   

• 105: Kanban in Small Teams

  Implementing Kanban in Small Teams

• 106: From "Project" to "Product"

  Moving from Retrospectives to Process Improvement

  Self-Organizing Teams and Entitlement

  What is our problem? What is the root cause? Let's fix that. Then move on to the next problem.

   

• 107: 
• 213: Sandboxing and Database Schema Versioning

  Video coming soon

   

Sunday, 2 Nov 2008 - Taking Action

9:30

• 213: Kanban (combined Kanban Apps and Kanban in Small Teams)
• 212: available
• 211: Beyond Traditional Architecture
• 210: Educating Customers and Domain Experts
• 209: Activity Modeling
• 207: ESB Patterns

CLOSING 11:00