IMPORTANT NOTICE: BEER AND PIZZA ARE FREE

Claud Debussy said ‘music is the space between the notes’.  Artists call the space around objects ‘negative space’.



The idea behind cross-functional teams is simple enough: team members work within each others negative spaces.  Yet, one of the failures of our community is that we don’t use cross-functional teams effectively, if at all.  (A Java tester, 6 Java developers, a Java Scrum master and a cranky CTO whose favourite language is Smalltalk but who can program in Java is - do I need to say it? - not a cross functional team.)

Cross functional teams are hard to manage; they will not emerge from the iteration, nor will they spontaneously become emotionally intelligent.  For this reason, our community has contributed literature, workshops and talks in regards to process and process improvement.  This is our fetish.  Our obsession.  The agile manifesto, with its people over processes, is now forgotten, it is ‘slain and splashed to the four winds of heaven’.  This won’t do.

Based on our: ‘The Fifth Dimension: You’ve Just Entered The Financial Engineering Zone’, this talk will deal with:

• Cross-functional teams: how to build them, how to manage them.
• People via Process.
• Social dynamics.
• The negative space of our experiences.

The talk will suit all levels, including:

• Developers in cross-functional teams.
• Managers who want to know how to get a team up and running.
• Tech leads who work on agile projects.
• C-Level managers who really want to know what’s going on.  This is your chance to go and see.

Engineering takes places in the gaps in between our knowledge; in between the ideological purity we want and the contradictions we face; in between bullies, tantrums and perfectionism; in between demands for products and quality.  This is the reality we face and therefore the subtext of this talk.

About Financial Agile
Financial Agile is a charity whose aim is to disseminate knowledge about engineering.  The work of the group sits in the spaces in between management, software development and financial engineering.  Contributors are from Rotterdam, Amsterdam and London, what we call the Reverse Randstad.  We are interested in finance because we honestly think that if you can produce high quality systems in finance you can produce them anywhere.

Because the problems we are facing are at least partially generative, the group takes a probe and response approach its current goals.  But, they include the following:

• People over process.
• Fighting a total war against bullshit and bullshit artists.  (A sort of ‘Voetbal als oorlog’ but for engineering.)
• The study, adaption and dissemination of the square law of computing, we call it the square law of spreadsheets.
• A dedication to the next generation.
• True cross-functionalism.
• Preparationism.