Agile 2007 Roundup

Got back earlier this week. I'll make a short post of my impressions since we're two days from release. The big trend is in adoption in the enterprise. Last year's conference was all about effecting change in a hostile environment or how to build small successes into wider adoption. This year was more experience reports from large corporations taking Agile out of small groups and doing whole organizational change.

SalesForce did a great presentation on how they handled a top down decision to move to agile development. It happened within a three month window. They did wholesale reprogramming of everyone, piecemeal training of project managers as they could, and employed coaches to move it all along. Sounded hectic as all hell, but they moved back from being a once a year (barely) release to quarterly releases, which is what they did was a smaller company.

The other trend I'm seeing is that Ruby is everyone's darling. There was some of this last year, but now it's almost a religion in some sects. I commented to an agile conference friend on how today's Ruby programmers are just recovering Java programmers. It's a nice language, but for my part dynamic languages have more issues than they solve. Didn't we go down this path with Visual Basic and collectively decide we wanted strong data typing more than we wanted flexible variables?

Anyhow, gotta run.