Agile Development Practices Conference

Dec-7-2007

Post written by Chris Spagnuolo. Follow Chris on Twitter Add comment

I’ve just finished up attending the first Agile Development Practices Conference at the beautiful Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, FL. All I can say is this: If you’re doing agile and didn’t attend, you really need to consider attending next year. This was hands down one of the best and most informative conferences I’ve attended. Aside from the great location in sunny central Florida, this conference featured some of today’s greatest thought leaders in the agile world. There is way too much to fill you in on in a single blog post, so over the next few weeks, I’ll pour through the myriad pages of notes I took and try to convey some of the great ideas that I was fortunate enough to hear this week. But, just to give you a taste of what’s coming down the line, here’s a run-down of the conference highlights:

Mary Poppendieck of Poppendieck, LLC started off the conference with a killer keynote presentation called Welcome to the Mainstream. Yes…agile has gone mainstream, and Mary gave us a rundown of how to fail with agile…of course with counterpoints on how to succeed.
Esther Derby of Esther Derby Associates had a great session entitled Toward a More Agile Culture. It was a great focused discussion about different types of organizational cultures and what is required culturally to support successful agile adoptions.
Andy Hunt of The Pragmatic Programmers and one of the original 17 signatories to the Agile Manifesto gave a thought provoking talk about using the right side of your brain to solve your toughest problems in his session entitled Refactoring Your Wetware: Thinking Differently About Thinking. Andy also gave a very inspiring closing keynote speech about Looking Toward the Future of Agile.
Michael Mah of QSM Associates presented an incredible case study about Benchmarking Agile Productivity. Michael presented an amazing set of metrics from over 7,000 traditional software projects and compared the performance of agile projects to them. You’ll be very happy to see some of the results of this case study.
James Coplien of Nordija and the father of organizational patterns, gave perhaps the best talk of the conference on Organizational Patterns: Foundations of Agile. Cope clearly laid out the top ten patterns of the most successful software development organizations and the values these are based upon. If you want to truly become a extraordinary and hyper-productive agile development team, you’ll definitely want to read about the patterns you need to base your practices on.
In addition to these amazing speakers, I was fortunate enough to present a short talk about Becoming Agile at the Rally Software Development Customer Summit. The talk centered around our team’s agile adoption to date. I’ll be putting the PowerPoint online for download here in the next few days.
I also coordinated an Open Space session with Rachel Weston of Rally Software about Agile Contracting. The session featured myself, Rachel, Dave Bouwman, Andy Brandt of CodeSprinters, and Zvonimir Durcevic of i-new.
Finally, Richard Sharpe of Enerjy Software, will be posting a series of video podcast interviews from the conference over the next few weeks. Interviewees will include folks like Jean Tabaka, Mary and Tom Poppindieck, Dave Bouwman, myself, and several others. As Richard posts the videos, I’ll provide links to them for you.

So those are the highlights. Stay tuned for more details and commentary in the coming weeks. And make your plans now to attend the conference next November!!!