Agile 2006 Conference
What a gas. I've been back about a week playing catch-up, hence the tardiness of the post. Quite exhilarating to meet so many like minded people. It was great to meet so many people in roughly the same boat as us (i.e. just getting off the ground).
In a highly unscientific study, I discovered that most Agile process rollouts are sitting at one year or less. About 65% of the people who were doing agile (any agile process) where still at the one project or "Pilot" stage. While the talking heads kept repeating that everyone has unique problems requiring individual solutions, my observation was that people tended to hit the same stumbling blocks - most notably, integrating the test process. I might even call this "Extending Agile beyond the core development team." More on that later.
Two main things struck me about the crowd:
I'll preface this by saying that we're a Scrum shop and biased, but my two favorite speakers where Mike Cohn (Mountain Goat Software - Agile Estimating and Planning) and Ken Schwaber (co-creator of scrum with Jeff Sutherland). Mike is one of those jovial, bigger-than-life types that you instantly want to go have a beer with. His estimation stuff seems obvious in retrospect, but that's true of all good ideas. Ken is more soft-spoken and profound. The way he talk - anecdotally with personal experiences - makes it seem easy. But the quote he repeated many times was "This is hard stuff".
Who I didn't particularly care for, surprisingly, was Kent Beck (creator of XP). He was a little too metaphysical for my tastes. He spent a half hour (his allotted time in the session I saw) talking about courage and integrity and some other crap, never once actually XP practices, what they are, and how they work together. Of the speakers at the conference, he has definitely drank the most kool-aid.
In a highly unscientific study, I discovered that most Agile process rollouts are sitting at one year or less. About 65% of the people who were doing agile (any agile process) where still at the one project or "Pilot" stage. While the talking heads kept repeating that everyone has unique problems requiring individual solutions, my observation was that people tended to hit the same stumbling blocks - most notably, integrating the test process. I might even call this "Extending Agile beyond the core development team." More on that later.
Two main things struck me about the crowd:
- The relative lack of "I drank the kool-aid" fanaticism.
- The wide swath of people from the organization participating
I'll preface this by saying that we're a Scrum shop and biased, but my two favorite speakers where Mike Cohn (Mountain Goat Software - Agile Estimating and Planning) and Ken Schwaber (co-creator of scrum with Jeff Sutherland). Mike is one of those jovial, bigger-than-life types that you instantly want to go have a beer with. His estimation stuff seems obvious in retrospect, but that's true of all good ideas. Ken is more soft-spoken and profound. The way he talk - anecdotally with personal experiences - makes it seem easy. But the quote he repeated many times was "This is hard stuff".
Who I didn't particularly care for, surprisingly, was Kent Beck (creator of XP). He was a little too metaphysical for my tastes. He spent a half hour (his allotted time in the session I saw) talking about courage and integrity and some other crap, never once actually XP practices, what they are, and how they work together. Of the speakers at the conference, he has definitely drank the most kool-aid.
posted by nitpickable at
2:05 PM
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