More than XP. More than one day.

We are pleased to welcome two renowned keynote speakers to this year’s XPDay conference.

Jeff Patton Embrace Uncertainty

Yvonne Rogers Cheek-to-Cheek: why Co-Located Collaboration Persists

Jeff Patton - Embrace Uncertainty

Abstract

When Kent Beck first published Extreme Programming Explained in 2000 he invited us to embrace change. Certainly XP’s value system and practices support that. However, succeeding in XP, or any Agile process now requires more. We’ve come to value the successful delivery of the outcome of our work. It’s the value our “user stories” bring to business and end users that use the software that matter most. If user stories are a means to an end, then it’s the end that matters most.

When we focus on the outcome, a backlog of user stories becomes a pretty volatile thing as we add and remove stories as necessary while constantly evaluating our progress towards some outcome. Managing to an outcome may mean that we set out on a project with a half empty backlog hoping to identify the specific stories we’ll need to achieve our outcome. The acceptance criteria for our software actually never lived in the story-by-story acceptance tests, but in the often subjective evaluation of our progress towards that outcome. Successfully achieving that outcome involves embracing the uncertainty of not knowing specifically how you will.

This talk addresses managing progress towards that outcome and the tactics that help you live with uncertainty necessary to do so.

Biography

Jeff Patton has designed and developed software for the past 13 years on a wide variety of projects from on-line aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records. Jeff has focused on Agile approaches since working on an early Extreme Programming team in 2000. In particular Jeff has specialized in the application of user centered design techniques to improve Agile requirements, planning, and iterative product design and development. Some of his recent writings on the subject are found at www.agileproductdesign.com, Alistair Cockburn’s Crystal Clear, and his regular StickyMinds.com and IEEE Software Magazine columns. His forthcoming book “Agile Development Outside-In” will be released in Addison-Wesley’s Agile Development Series and gives tactical advise to those seeking to deliver useful, usable, and valuable software using Agile methods. Jeff is the founder and co-moderator of the Yahoo agile-usability discussion group.

Yvonne Rogers - Cheek-to-Cheek: why Co-Located Collaboration Persists

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing interest in how ubiquitous computing technologies can be designed to support multiple co-located users working together, notably interactive tabletop surfaces, large screens, and tangible interfaces. Moreover, there is growing evidence that many forms of collaboration are best done face-to-face and that attempts to make them more flexible through being replaced by virtual team working can actually be detrimental. In my talk I will explain, firstly, why this is the case and, secondly, how new shareable technologies can be designed to enhance ever more diverse forms of ‘cheek-to-cheek’ collaborative interactions. From a theoretical perspective, I will show the value of the distributed cognition approach in elucidating the nature of the collaborative problem- solving that takes place, the role of verbal and non-verbal behaviour, the coordinating mechanisms used, the way communication is hindered or facilitated and how knowledge is shared.

Biography

Yvonne Rogers is a professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the Open University. From 2003-2006, she was a professor of Informatics and Information Science at Indiana University. Before, she was a Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the former School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (now the Department of Informatics) at Sussex University, UK, where in 1997 she co-founded with the late Mike Scaife the Interact Lab, an interdisciplinary research center that was concerned with the possible interactions between people, technologies and representations. She has also worked as a senior researcher at Alcatel Telecommunications company and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Apple Computer Inc., and the University of Queensland.

Yvonne is internationally renowned for her work in human-computer interaction, interaction design, computer-supported cooperative work, UbiComp and interactive learning environments. Her research focuses on augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities with interactive technologies that move beyond the desktop. This involves designing user experiences through appropriating and assembling a diversity of pervasive technologies. A main focus is not the technology per se but the design and integration of the digital representations that are presented via them to support social and cognitive activities in ways that extend our current capabilities.

Yvonne has always had a passion for theory and has written extensively and critically about its role in HCI, in particular, distributed and external cognition.