Shaun MacRae

I recently attended the Agile 2007 Conference in Washington, DC. The conference is put on annually by the Agile Alliance and is growing larger each and every year, with ~1100 attending this year.

The conference was great because there seemed to be something there for everyone. In fact on the first day, I had no idea how I was going to choose between the 10-20 sessions running at any given time, so I attended the Introduction to the Agile 2007 Conference session. I was quickly paired up with one of the presenters for the conference and by the end of the session I had mapped out my whole week based on topics and speakers that I was interested in.

Topics varied in difficulty (Beginners – Advanced), varied in interest (Development, Testing, Education, etc.), and varied in presentation style (Tutorial, Hands-On, Talking Heads, etc). I found I was mostly interested in topics and speakers presenting the Intermediate – Advanced, Talking Heads – type presentations on just about any topic – although that was not a requirement and the few Beginner sessions I attended were also worthwhile.

I managed to hear talks from Bob Martin (Agile Manifesto Signatory)(Object Mentor) about Extreme Programming (XP), from Hubert Smits (Rally Software) about Scrum, from Mary Poppendieck (Poppendieck.LLC) about Lean, from Dave Thomas (Agile Manifesto Signatory)(Bedarra, Object Mentor) about Scaling Lean and Agile, from Mark Striebeck (Google) about Agile Adoption at Google, from Joshua Kerievsky (Industrial Logic) about Refactoring and Evolutionary Design, from Rachel Davies (Agile Experience) about Agile Blending, from Mike Roberts (NYSE Transact Tools) about Continuous Integration, from Ken Schwaber (Agile Manifesto Signatory) about Scaling Scrum, from Alan Shalloway (Net Objectives) about The Business Case for Agility, from Michele Sliger (Sliger Consulting) about Agile in the Waterfall Enterprise, from Linda Rising (Linda Rising LLC) about Agile Estimation, and from Mike Cohn (Mountain Goat Software) with a Guide to Transitioning.

I won’t bore you with my ten pages of typewritten notes, but please give me a shout if you are interested in the details of any of the presentations I attended.

Instead, I just want to mention a few of the common topics that came up. After frantically trying to keep up with all of the information for five days I found it interesting to sit back and reflect on some of the ideas that came up on more than one occasion. This really helped me to gain insight about how things are going in industry with respect to all of Agile’s proposed best practices and their implementations. It is valuable to see where companies are struggling because it helps guide research and development around those themes.

One of the most common themes was Scalability of Agile. It doesn’t surprise me that organizations are struggling with this. There are always work culture barriers and corporate red tape, especially in larger organizations, that make adopting best practices (if different than the current practices) very difficult. Some of the leading thinkers in our industry however where at the conference outlining approaches and attesting to successful transitions of large scale. It is possible!

Another common theme was Visibility. I believe that visibility is fundamental to project success, and those projects lacking visibility, are likely lacking the tools and processes that facilitate it. We heard about a number of facilitators for increasing visibility, including open work-spaces, project collaboration / management / dashboard tools, and regular feedback. Conducting retrospectives and collecting metrics and velocities where also noted as valuable tools for facilitating visibility.

Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) was a popular topic and seemed to creep its way into many of the conversations. The stress was on writing acceptance tests up front in order to help elicit requirements and define requirements in a testable manner. This approach is also helpful for the developers when coding begins.

There is an XP concept that came up on several occasions that I grew quite fond of: If we do the hard things often (like integration and releases), they will be less hard. An analogy would be spending the $500 for car maintenance each year, which is certainly less painful (and probably less wasteful) then the $5000 bill you are likely to incur when you wait for things to break.

The concept of Thin Slicing came up a few times. This refers to implementing vertically (through all layers of the system) small demonstrable features, often referred to as minimal releasable feature sets. For organizations struggling with this concept, it was advised to focus on breaking down large projects, and decoupling functional components early on in the project.

Lastly, I thought it was interesting that Agile was referred to as “a very disciplined approach to software development” throughout the conference. It sounded out of the ordinary because typically “Agile” approaches are contrasted with “Disciplined” approaches – wrongly so. Agile approaches require a great deal of process discipline, and their successes / failures can often be a result of such discipline or lack thereof.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.