Keynotes

Opening Keynote

Piergiorgio Grossi
Operating Manager, Ferrari Racing Team

Title
The GranPrix starts at 2 o'clock: a race to race Software Development eXPerience

Piergiorgio Grossi is Operating Manager of the information systems of Ferrari Racing Team.

Piergiorgio brought his experience as a software engineer and manager to the team that won 6 F1 World Championships in a row for Constructors and 5 F1 World Championships in a row for drivers.

Before taking on the role of Operating Manager of the Information Systems Dept, Piergiorgio managed the software development team that developed simulation applications, telemetry analysis applications, and software for the management of the car during the design and the race.

The criticality of software and the continuous development process, have lead Piergiorgio to become a leading expert of Agile Methods in critical environments.

Before joining the Ferrari Racing Team, Piergiorgio worked as a software engineer in the domain of character recognition, AI, classification, document management for a large Italian software company.

Piergiorgio holds a Laurea Degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Genova, an important background to manage complexity in one of the best racing team in F1.

Closing Keynote

Kent Beck

Title
Ease at Work.

Kent Beck is the Founder and Director of Three Rivers Institute (TRI).

His career has combined the practice of software development with reflection, innovation, and communication.

His contributions to software development include patterns for software, the rediscovery of test-first programming, the xUnit family of developer testing tools, and Extreme Programming. He currently divides his time between writing, programming, and coaching.

Beck is the author/co-author of Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2nd Edition, Contributing to Eclipse, Test-Driven Development: By Example, Planning Extreme Programming, The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and the JUnit Pocket Guide.

He received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon.

Morning Keynote

Olivier Lafontan
Managing Director Agile Enablement Services, Exoftware

Title
Concept to Cash&Agile, and beyond.

Olivier Lafontan is Managing Director Agile Enablement Services for Exoftware.

Oli has over 10 years experience in programme and project management in both Agile and non-Agile environments: he is now a fervent partisan of "agility" in all areas of business.

As well as heading Exoftware's Agile Enablement Services, Oli is also involved as a hands on Business Transformation coach with large Financial Services, Manufacturing and Telecoms clients.

Olivier obtained his Honours Bachelors degree in Business Administration from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle (UK) and his MBA from the Institut Europeen des Affaires de Besancon (France). He then started working as a developer and rapidly worked his way up to team leader and then to project manager for a software house from Glasgow, Graham Technology, following which he took over the programme management responsibility for the overall EMEA CRM implementation initiative at Lexmark.

Olivier's next job was as a Project Manager for Egg, the world's largest pure online bank, where he became enthused by Agile. Coming from a business education background rather than technical, Olivier now focuses on spreading and applying Agile thinking outside technical functions of organisations: his work on Agile Analysis has generated a lot of interest from peers and clients since it was published in 2004.