Next year at EclipseCon 2012 we are introducing a new co-located conference called Agile ALM Connect. As the name hopefully conveys, this conference will focus on the tools and methods that make software developers and teams more successful across the entire lifecycle.
I believe this is the perfect time and place for this type of conference. There are a lot of new tools being introduced into the software development lifecycle. Tools for doing continuous integration, continuous build, continuous deployment, new approaches to testing, requirements management, release management, and new tools for devops. Tools like Hudson/Jenkins, Maven, Puppet, git, Mylyn are becoming commonplace for software development. Organizations are adopting agile methods for doing software development, like Scrum and Kanban. The same organizations are also responding to new deployment platforms for mobile and cloud. The challenge is how to integrate and connect these tools, platforms, people and the methodologies. Agile ALM Connect is geared to educating and exploring the best practices in this space.
The conference will held in conjunction with EclipseCon 2012 but it is more than just an Eclipse event. We want to encourage the entire industry to attend and participate. We want people from the Agile community, industry ALM solutions, open source projects and consultants to participate. Eclipse plays an important role with projects like Mylyn, Hudson, m2eclispe, EGit/JGit, and others but the Agile ALM space is much much bigger than Eclipse.
The Call for Papers for the conference is now open. We are using the same submission system as EclipseCon but there is a different program committee. Mik Kersten (Mylyn), is the program chair, and he is joined by Jason van Zyl (Maven, m2eclipse, etc), Luke Kaines (Puppet), Michael Huttermann (author of Agile ALM) and Dave West (Forrester Research).
I hope you will join us in Reston for Agile ALM Connect.
