Title: Guerilla IT with Pharo
Piotr Palacz
Email: piotr@palacz.net


Abstract: 'Guerilla' is used here as a label for a situation with very limited resources, very short delivery timeframes, imprecise requirements in flux, in a context of a huge project with its own set of challenges.
The presentation is a reflection about the choices that contributed to the project's success.
One of the central factors was, arguably, something counter-intuitive: an insistence of maintaining traceability (among requirements and implementations artifacts) and constructing the solution in a way that supported it through design and implementation, using e.g. embedded DSL, some of the OO patterns, and suitable naming conventions.
In the industry, traceability, in general, is not popular - despite occasional declarations to the contrary. Historically and as far as I can tell, the term is not even a part of the Smalltalk culture - hence the potential interest for showing that guerilla IT can be waged in an orderly way. 

Bio: My first contact with Smalltalk was around '87 - I took a Smalltalk course at school, using Digitalk/V. I worked with Smalltalk full time between 1990 and 2002 or so, in Australia and in the US, mostly in enterprise-level applications and systems. 
After several years of working with big companies and big systems in the US as Technical/Solution/Application/Lead/etc Architect, I went independent and consequently had the opportunity to use Smalltalk (Pharo specifically) on three different projects over the last 3+ years. The experiences that led to the presentation arose, first, from a technical audit of a large project, and then, from assuming responsibility for implementing some of the recommendations in that audit.