Overall, Agile 2007 was a wonderful experience. I really enjoyed my time at the conference and attended some really good sessions (and a few that were really bad as well). This was my first conference and I’ll be back for sure next year.
My favorite sessions included:
(Follow the links for the abstracts, presentations, and handouts)
- Agile Enterprise Rollout–The Greening of the Software Industry (Jean Tabaka, Ryan Martens)
- The Role of Leadership in Software Development (Mary Poppendieck)
- Learning Kaizen from Toyota [with MindMaps] (Mary Poppendieck, Kenji Hiranabe)
- I Don’t Like Mondays – Improving Agile Team Collaboration Events (Jean Tabaka)
- Reaching New Heights: Learning to Adapt is Essential (Susan Ershler)
- Agile adoption at Google: Potential and challenges of a true bottom-up organization (Mark Striebeck)
- The Agile Enterprise: Real World Experience in Creating Agile Companies (Jeff Sutherland)
Some of the big-picture realizations that I came to:
- Mary Poppendieck has turned into the Tom Peters of the software industry (well-deserved).
- Lean thinking has started to move to the center of the agile universe (finally).
- Executable specification / story-driven development is moving to the mainstream (finally).
- Everyone wants to scale agile.
- Everyone wants to distribute agile.
A few things that I’m concerned about:
- Lean has moved to buzzword status. A lot of people are talking about Lean but I don’t think the majority understand the essence behind it. I think this will get better.
- Everyone wants to make “Enterprisey” software with agile teams.
- There are a lot of “agile” consulting firms that are full of shit.
And some other random thoughts…
I think the fact that everyone is focused on “scaling” agility to large teams and distributed projects and that there will be a lot of agile disasters over the next couple of years. Now that the bigger software companies are moving to agile, the teams are getting too big and they are adopting agile in scary ways (too big, too fast). I think that you need to evolve to big teams, not start out there. I would also (passionately) argue that you should focus on how to have smaller software instead of how to scale agile teams to accommodate large software. I seem to be in the minority.
Lastly, I really think that the organizers of the conference need to step it up. The programs sucked (hard to read, hard to navigate, mis-prints, missing pages, etc.), the event was really hard to follow (talk duration, locations, topics), the location of the conference sucked (tight hallways, hard-to-find rooms, etc.), and the beverages and food was awful (a big thank you goes to Rally for providing everyone with bottled water).
I certainly appreciate that everyone worked hard to put this together, but I expect the basics to be nailed for a major conference.
2 Comments
I co-facilitated the “kaizen workshop”;
Learning Kaizen from Toyota [with MindMaps] (Mary Poppendieck, Kenji Hiranabe)
and felt that the keyword Lean strongly supports Agile in the industry level.
Here’s my blog about the session.
http://jude-users.com/en/modules/weblog/details.php?blog_id=37
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