Biography

Brian is VP of Product Management at Sonatype, with extensive open source experience as a member of the Apache Software Foundation for the past 7 years and former Chair of the Apache Maven project. Brian has provided significant development contributions to the Maven ecosystem, including the maven-dependency-plugin and maven-enforcer-plugin. He has over 15 years of experience driving the vision behind, as well as developing and leading the development of software for organizations ranging from startups to large enterprises. Brian holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Daniel Webster College.

Open Source Components Fuel Agile Development

Usage of Java components to build applications has grown exponentially. Today, an application consists of 80 - 90% components. And components are a great fit with agile development - using pre-built components speeds development efforts making it possible to shorten development cycles.
Many of these components are open source components that are housed in the Central Repository, the defacto standard used by open source project teams to distribute their binaries. Recent research shows some interesting trends:
8 billion components were downloaded from Central in the last 12 months.
53% of survey respondents are standardizing on an open source development infrastructure stack.
76% of large organizations have no control over what components are being used in software development projects

Although components help improve developer productivity so that applications can be delivered faster, if components are not managed effectively, security, licensing, and quality issues can put your organization at risk. Gartner addresses the need to manage components as part of an overall software supply chain approach: “IT supply chain integrity issues are expanding from hardware into software and information. They are growing more complex as IT systems are assembled from a large number of geographically diverse providers, and, now of mainstream concern to enterprise IT.” - Ray Valdes, research vice president at Gartner.

Join us as we introduce key concepts for managing and exploiting these components.
We’ll discuss the current state of application development market, the promise and challenge of components
We’ll discuss how components need to be managed throughout the entire software lifecycle
We’ll discuss the ramifications that components have for Agile and DevOps methodologies
We’ll provide you with a set of best practice considerations to kick-start your component management initiative.