Value Driven Development

Moderator: Nikolay Puntikov

Topics for discussion:

Economy: what drives decision-makers to launch software projects, how they define “value” of investment and how they assess success or failure.
Psychology: how important it is to push the “value” down to the troops in order to ensure that team member share the value and contribute to it.
Methodology: how agile methodologies help to achieve the “value” of the project.
Sourcing strategy: how to balance potentially conflicting interests of project stakeholders and project teams (especially, in case of outsourcing).

Experts: David Webb, Alexey Kanatov, Grigory Labzovsky, George Sharkov

Nikolay Puntikov

Bio

Dr. Nikolay Puntikov, President, Offshore Delivery, Exigen Services
Coinciding with Russia’s dramatic move toward privatization in 1991, Nick Puntikov founded StarSoft Development Labs, one of Russia’s seminal private software engineering firms. During the next 15 years as CEO of StarSoft he developed the company into a premier outsourcing software services provider catering to clients in Europe and North America.

In 2007, StarSoft merged with Exigen Services to become a leading force in the IT outsourcing space in Central and Eastern Europe and a next-generation application outsourcing provider. In Exigen Services, Puntikov is responsible for managing the global delivery organization, encompassing 2000 developers from ten delivery centers across six countries, including China.

Puntikov is an outspoken advocate of both the domestic and international portions of the Russian IT services industry. Since 2003, he has served on the Board of the Russian National Association of Software Developers (RUSSOFT).

An internationally recognized expert in his field, Puntikov has spoken at many conferences in North America, Europe and Japan, and is referenced frequently in the press on topics such as software outsourcing, software localization, and knowledge management.

Puntikov holds a Master of Science degree from the St. Petersburg State University in Russia, where he currently resides. In parallel with work, he defended in 2007 his Ph.D. thesis on the subject of formal modeling of software project life cycles.

David Webb

Bio

In August 2007 David joined Exigen Services as VP of EMEA Professional services as well as heading up Exigen’s Global Agile Practice. In his role leading the agile practice David is a regular speaker at industry events and has written several articles on agile software development. He also provides thought leadership in the company and drives the strategy for agile software development within Exigen services.

Prior to joining Exigen David spent 8 years at Intel where he was Software Development Director – EMEA Sales and Marketing Applications. David managed the development team in EMEA that write applications for use globally by Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group. His group was based in Russia and the UK. David was a prominent member of Intel’s Russia leadership team.

He joined Intel in 2000 as a member of the IT organisation initially managing software development teams solely in the UK. In 2002 he started to utilise internal and subcontract Russian development resources in support of Intel’s strategy for global application development. At this time he began to establish practices and metrics to effectively manage and execute offshore and agile projects for which he and his team won the company wide Software Quality Award.

As a long time agile advocate, his role was also encompassed the adoption of agile methodologies across Intel’s IT development teams worldwide as well as devise and execute strategies that that led Intel to achieve its offshore development goals.

He hired and led the IT Development team in Nizhny Novgorod in Russia and was a strong advocate within Intel and in the industry for using development resources in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Prior to joining Intel, David held a number of positions leading and managing software development projects in the Banking and Finance industry.

David also championed the use of outsourced agile development and has a long history of working with Exigen Services to define the methodologies and processes required to operate XP and outsourced development together. These processes were a major contributor to Exigen’s growth as a global leader in Agile software development.

Alexey Kanatov

Bio

Alexey Kanatov is the lead of the R&D center of Intel in Moscow and also head of the simulation technologies department. Alexey has started his career in IT in 1989 working as SW engineer in “GOSSTANDARD”. Later in 1990-1992 took part in different commercial SW engineering projects. Since 1992 took part in the design and implementation of the programming environment for Eiffel. Since 1996 he continued with commercial programming in Java. Alexey works for Intel since 2002 had several managerial positions – Compiler lab QA manager (2003), Compiler Russia manager (2003), Simulation technologies manager (2006). Since 2007 Alexey is the Moscow R&D center lead.

Alexey graduated Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (Technical University) in 1992 with the “engineer-mathematician” diploma, in 1995 after end of post-graduate got the “engineer-scientist diploma”.

Married, has 2 daughters.

Grigory Labzovsky

Bio

Grigory Labzovsky, Director of the Saint Petersburg Center of High Technology,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Grigory heads the center for software development that currently employs more than 350 software engineers working on different software projects. The key technologies are the Java platform (Java SE, Java ME), a family of C & C++ compilers, virtualization, software developer tools, the JCAPS platform and more. It is under Grigory’s leadership that the Center of High Technology has successfully implemented a number of strategic projects, including the following:

The Center of software technology competence - officially open on April 7, 2009, the center is currently widely demanded among customers and partners who want to get acquainted with Sun solutions and test-run prototypes;
Sun Technologies Days - the largest software developer conference in Russia. This year’s event was attended by more than 3000 participants from Russia and CIS countries;
Extensive cooperation with the St. Petersburg State University – the project that allows the Physics department to be actively involved in the international Large Hadron Collider project using Sun’s HPC machines.

Prior to the role of director in 2007, Grigory was responsible for the software development center operations and drove a set of strategic programs in the region, such as establishing relations with the academic society, promotion of open source software in Russia, and adoption of Solaris.

Prior to his work at Sun Microsystems, Grigory was an engineer and then a project manager in the Russian company Elbrus (2002-2004). Before that he held a position of a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute for Scientific research. Grigory graduated from the Department of Physics of the St. Petersburg State University in 1998.

George Sharkov

Bio

Dr. George Sharkov is born in 1961 in Pleven, Bulgaria. Graduated Mathematics and Computer Science at Sofia University, obtained PhD in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence), specialization in applied informatics, research in biophysics and genetics, enterprise information systems architectures. Since 1994 he is leading international software teams and projects for banking and finances, online trading and auctions, e-business, internet exchanges and B2B markets, innovative e-trading solutions. At present – Regional Manager for Eastern Europe of the European Software Institute (Bilbao, Spain – www.esi.es ), and manager of the ESI Center Bulgaria (www.esicenter.bg). Instructor in SPI (Software Process Improvement), software engineering quality, implementation of CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration, SEI), accredited IT Mark appraiser (covers information security, business maturity and quality of processes). Leader of research network in Cryptography and Information Security (www.cryptobg.org). Lecturer at Sofia University.

Chairman of BASSCOM (Bulgarian Association of Software Companies) for 2001-2007. Initiator and promoter of the regional ICT branding and competitiveness initiative. Founder of the ICT Cluster Bulgaria.