Date: Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 6:30 PM
Location: Cadence / Bldg 10, 2655 Seely Ave, San Jose, CA (map)
Agile Discussion: Kanban, Scrum, SoC, and ASIC …
Panelists:
Kathryn Kuhn, Hewlett-Packard, Agile Evangelist – Product Development IT
Harsh Kumar, Intel, Business Development Manager
Damian Brown, Symantec, Sr. Manager, Program Management
William Pietri, Consultant

This talk features a panel of leading experts discussing new the latest advances in Agile development (Kanban, Scrum, SoC, etc.). John Swan will be the moderator for the discussions.

John worked on IC design and design methodology for 20 years at Motorola Labs covering the design flow from requirements and HDL entry through layout. John also worked as an SoC Consulting Manager and as IP Product Marketing Manager. John has been contracting to insert leading-edge SoC & FPGA design technology into design teams. John was Awarded the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core and Meritorious Service Awards in 2012 for his leadership role as Chair of the CS Chapter of Silicon Valley. John earned a BSEE degree with High Honors in Computer Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He has an MBA from Roosevelt University.

In her role at HP Kathryn works with teams that range from highly experimental teams in HP Labs to HP Server teams to Software Operations monitoring teams. Kathryn hopes to be a disruptive force for anyone who thinks that the way we develop products is just fine.Download position statement here

Kathryn is a self-described Agile Evangelist and Chief Analogy Officer at Hewlett-Packard. Kathryn began her career at Accenture in Washington D.C., has done service work in Guatemala, moved her family to Singapore, and now calls the San Francisco Bay Area home. Kathryn has been practicing Agile techniques in its various forms for about 11 years in large and small companies and holds several Agile certifications that are meant to impress people.

Harsh is Business Development Manager for System Development and Optimization tools for agile development for SoC’s, ASIC’s and Systems. Such agility has not been possible before when going straight to Register Transfer Level (RTL) coding from requirements. In addition to added agility the new design technology and tools support much earlier validation and/or verification of the design, though at a higher level of abstraction.Download position statement here

Harsh is a Senior Manager with significant accomplishments in influencing company growth and market share. Accomplishments include several strategies implementation leading to successful design wins, product deliveries and market share growth. Coming from an engineering background, Harsh is well aware of the need to improve SoC design methodology to add more agility and design confidence through earlier validation. Experienced in the entire product life-cycle including product concept and strategy development, business operations, and engineering management. Including Program Management to improve product development efficiency and TTM, Platform and Component (Si) engineering management starting from Architecture, development, validation (pre & post) and ramping into manufacturing. Harsh has a MSEE, Computer Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, and MSEE, Electrical Engineering from State University of New York.

Damian works with the Cloud Platform Engineering at Symantec where there world of software development, networking and data center hardware operations meet. Damian uses the values and principles of Agile to deliver high quality valuable solutions to customers while creating a working environment teams are excited to be a part of.Download position statement here

Damian is a Bay Area native and agile enthusiast. He started his career in the software development industry in a release management function in a traditional waterfall environment. As he learned more and more about the mindset and methodology of agile along with the value it brings to the customer and the team he knew this was something we wanted to pursue. His primary goal is to be the best agile practitioner and coach he can be.

As an early adopter and evangelist of both Agile and Lean methods, I now find myself in the odd position of telling people that they shouldn’t “do Agile”. Agile methods require certain organizational and cultural conditions to succeed; without that you get a lot of headache and very little improvement. Better to choose a method that fits your organization than to try to be something you’re not, no matter how fashionable. I’ll quickly cover some of the factors that go into the choice.Download position statement here

William Pietri comes from a family of entrepreneurs and software developers and has never strayed far. Always seeking better ways to make software, in 2000 he adopted an early Agile method, Extreme Programming; in 2010 he started applying Lean Startup techniques; he has mentored for Lean Startup Machine since 2011. A co-founder of 5 businesses (2 consulting companies, 3 product companies), he is currently at work on a new medical education product while advising a few companies on product and software processes. Past clients range from Bank of America and eBay to Wikipedia, Kiva, and Mozilla.