Exigen Services conducted a series of public lectures in business programming

The colloquia conducted by David Webb*, Vice President of Professional Services at Exigen Services, were attended by the students and faculty of the top five schools of St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics, St. Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation, St. Petersburg State University of Telecommunications, and St. Petersburg State University of Engineering and Economics.

The precise title of the course was Business Programming: Worldwide Industry Trends. David’s presentation was dedicated to the development trends of the IT industry in Russia and worldwide, the interaction of IT with business, and the perspective of software development for business. A special emphasis was placed upon the advantages of flexible methodologies in business programming. Webb argued the flexible methodologies to be the most convenient and suitable approach to the development of business applications, allowing the developers to create a software product best adapted to the requirements of the business.

“Russia in general and St. Petersburg in particular, has a lot of excellent programmers; academic IT training is very strong here. A new generation of software engineers and testers is growing up, and now we would like to share our experience with them, familiarizing them with the worldwide progress of business programming. I am confident that the new approaches to software development I outlined in my lecture will shape the future of the entire industry,” said Mr. Webb, an established guru in the management of decentralized teams of software engineers using the Agile family of methodologies.

The public lectures were attended by some 400 people, most of them young programmers and software engineers. Due to the effort being made by such leaders of the IT industry as Exigen Services, the students gain a unique opportunity to reinforce their theoretical knowledge with practical experience, substantially advancing in their study of modern software development methodologies. The educational program organized by Exigen Services is based on the practical experience of the company staff giving lectures and teaching academic courses, and is aimed at enriching the theoretical program with applied practical knowledge. The transfer of practical experience between the company staff and students makes an excellent addition to the scholarly educational programs.

From 2000 until 2007, David Webb worked at Intel Russia, managing the development teams using the flexible methodology models. Last year, he was engaged by Exigen Services to manage the agile development programs. David is also in charge of development of business programming at the company. He is based in London and frequently speaks at scientific conferences and business forums all over the world.