Technical debt is inevitable in applications development and many organizations and teams struggle to manage it – when to take it on, when to avoid it and when and how to pay it down. On Thursday evening, November 7 the Development and Quality Assurance forums at the Technology Association of Oregon will bring together panelists representing different organizational, industry and product development perspectives to discuss their experiences and lessons from managing technical debt. This event will offer insight into how to define technical debt and tackle it realistically. A Q&A session will follow the panelists’ briefs. Attendees are encouraged to bring questions and share their experiences. This event will offer something for all organizational levels and roles.

Panelists include: James Shore, Agile Consultant & Coach Todd Whitaker, Technical Product Manager, Product Owner, TripWire Mark Menger, Manager Application Delivery Systems, PGE Becky James, Sr. Director of Software Development, WebMD Mark Campillo, Sr. Director Software Engineering, NWEA Chris Woerner, VP Product Management, ADP Andrew Richards, CTO, nResult

IT as a Value Creator - How to get IT out of the Engine Room

Abe Lietz, SVP & CIO - KinderCare Education

With digital transformation and technology disruption at the top of the agenda in the board room, IT is uniquely positioned to step of out of back office and take the lead in driving value creation. However, IT teams are often buried in technical debt and struggle to just “keep the lights on”. In this talk, Abe will discuss strategies to transformation the people, process and technology of IT to drive growth, create value, gain market share, and delight customers.

Key topics that will be explored in this talk include,

• Leadership design principles to support digital transformation

• Modern architectures to deliver with speed & quality

• Discuss going “all-in” on public cloud as a key enable

• Examine “experience first” design principles to delight customer

• Learn about leveraging the VC community to accelerate innovation

Abe Lietz is SVP & Chief Information Officer (CIO) for KinderCare Education. In this role, Mr. Lietz leads the Information Technology and Change Management functions for KinderCare and is charged with driving digital transformation to support business growth and managing all key enterprise business systems which includes in-center, family facing, mobile, data analytics and back office applications as well as all supporting infrastructure. Abe is leading a multi-year transformation of KinderCare’s digital capability by reorganizing its people, process and technology to deliver on value creation initiatives through the use of cloud-first architectures (SaaS, IaaS, & PaaS), as well as delivering multiple innovative mobile, web, and data solutions for its customers and staff.

A recognized industry expert, Abe has received multiple industry awards, including being recognized as San Diego’s Top Technology Executive in 2015. He is a frequent speaker on IT transformation and cloud migration strategies and has been featured in many publications including CIO.com, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and many others.

Prior to joining KinderCare, Mr. Lietz was CIO & VP, Customer Service Operations for Curves and Jenny Craig where he led a complete transformation of the IT organization, as well as managing the service contact center for both brands to drive a best-in-class service experience for customers, franchise owners and corporate users. Prior to Curves & Jenny Craig, Mr. Lietz was Chief Architect & Head of Divisional IT for Life Technologies (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific) where he was responsible for driving technology strategy, new technology incubation, and overall technical architecture for the IT infrastructure and applications footprint, as well as all instrument and software system product lines. Mr. Lietz holds a B.A. in Business & MIS from Washington State University.

In an effort to raise the effectiveness of Scrum, the Scrum Alliance created the Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) program (AKA Agile Engineering course.) A Certified Scrum Developer is someone who has demonstrated through a combination of formal training and a technical skills assessment that he or she has a working understanding of Scrum principles and has learned specialized Agile engineering skills.

This three-day class is aimed at helping software development professionals and teams be more effective when implementing Scrum and other Agile methodologies. You will learn how to create and maintain high quality systems through industry standard practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI) and common software design patterns. This class was specifically designed to deliver the core Agile Development Practices Learning Objectives of the CSD program and should prepare the participant to successfully pass the Scrum Alliance CSD Candidate Assessment.

This class focuses on automated testing, TDD (heavily covered in class), Continuous Integration, Design Concepts (Design Principles and Practices) and Extreme Programming (XP) practices. Class is hands-on, and you will participate in a project where you will build an actual feature using Agile practices and learn about the technical practices. You'll learn about how team members interact during sprints. Other topics covered include Technical Debt: Strategies & Techniques to help reduce technical debt.

In order to earn the CSD certification, the Scrum Alliance requires at least five days of formal training followed by a CSD assessment/evaluation. This class fulfills 21 of the required 35 hours and can be paired with the Certified ScrumMaster class to complete the requirement.