Waterfall 2006

If there is one international conference you attend this year make sure this is the one (perhaps especially pertinent after the SaArchitect Software Factories presentation last night). From the Waterfall2006 site:

" After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You've always known a good waterfall-based process is the right way to develop software projects. Come to the Waterfall 2006 conference and see how a sequential development process can benefit your next project. Learn how slow, deliberate handoffs (with signatures!) between groups can slow the rate of change on any project so that development teams have more time to spend on anticipating user needs through big, upfront design. "

Make sure you don't miss some of the most ground breaking tutorials of the year, like...

• Take Control of Your Team's Decisions NOW! by Ken Schwaber
• Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer by Jim Highsmith
• FIT Testing In When You Can; Otherwise Skip It by Ward Cunningham
• The Joy of Silence: Cube Farm Designs That Cut Out Conversation by Alistair Cockburn
• wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework by Kent Beck
• Very Large Projects: How to Go So Slow No One Knows You'll Never Deliver by Jutta Eckstein
• User Stories and Other Lies Users Tell Us by Mike Cohn
• Testing: Saving the Best for Last by Lisa Crispin
• Document-Driven Development by Eric Evans

Workshops include...

• User Feedback: Eliminating the Main Cause of Project Overruns
• Is the SEI Letting Us Down?
• The Impact of Paper Bond Weight on Design Quality
• Creating a Culture of Conformance: Development, Deployment and Defense of Company-wide Procedures for Software Development
• Dinosaur Strategies: How Data Professionals Can Still Prosper in Modern IT Organizations by Scott Ambler
• Nailing Down Requirements: Techniques to Prevent Change
• CMM Level 6: It's Bigger Than Five So It Must Be Better
• Semantics: Teaching Your Users What They Really Need
• Upfront Design: If A Little Is Good, A Lot is Better

Get full details here.

(BTW, that SaArchitect comment was strictly tongue in cheek - it was an excellent and well prepared introduction to Software Factories and if you weren't there you missed out. Personally, I think DSLs are quite possibly the future but I also think taking an Agile approach to them is going to prove to be their path to success.)