Agile Eastern Europe - The 3rd Season is Over
A few days ago I've returned from AgileEE 2011 which as always welcomed me with a great atmosphere and left me with a new energy. I don't want to repeat all that was said during the conference, especially that most of the slides has already been posted at conference website and I think most of the talks were taped.
What I would like to do though is to give you some of my personal takeaways from the talks I've attended (yes it was a multi-track conference and it's always so hard to make a choice :-(). So here they are...
Alistair Cockburn keynote was a great reminder that all the techniques and processes should be adaptive as even with the same people and the same tasks things can go differently. Applying different strategies in different contexts is something I personally believe in. I also liked the "reflective improvement" technique (keep these, try these, problems).
What I liked in Gojko Adzic talk was his message that we tend to accept ridiculous requirements that are "packaged" nicely as well as we should not rush into solving the first problem Client gives us. Well maybe it's pretty obvious, but still - never too much reminding about those things.
Then I've attended lighting talks by Artem Serdyuk about hiring or rather kicking people out (really nice one), Dmytro Mindra about software craftsmanship (very personal and energizing), Dima Malenko about taking actions, Alex Lutsaevsky about some techniques helping to facilitate retrospectives and by J.B.Reinsberger about economics of software design. I basically loved both lighting talk blocks during AgileEE, but the single talk that I personally find best was the one by Alex giving really nice hints about retrospectives (I just love practical stuff).
Piotr Żołnierek showed the way they took at the company to improve the collaboration between development and operations team. This is also the kind of talks I like as it's based on real experience, mistakes made and lessons learned from those mistakes. There should be more talks like this on every agile conference.
Henrik Berglund put some light on the responsibility model by Christopher Avery and Bill McCarley. What I find the most important in his talk was that the model itself can be applied only to ourselves, thus we need to work on ourselves to actually take more responsibility. I only missed some final conclusion related to the topic of his talks which was "Is Scrum Incompatible with Your Brain?".
Nathaniel Cadwell left me with three keywords (passion, perfectionism to be avoided and purpose) and also with some hunger for more lessons we can actually learn from the history or Art.
Elisabeth Hendrickson reminded me that actual needs, intentions and implementation do not overlap perfectly that is why we need to verify that as often as possible. I liked the "speculation buildup" name in this context. Another valuable thought was that the spirit of the story is as important as the letter, but is often being forgotten.
I really waited to hear Jurgen Appelo telling the story behind influencing ALE network to self organize around ALE2011 conference in Berlin (which I could not attend this year). Apart from the, as usual, interesting models behind the complex social systems that Jurgen likes to talk about, he just left me inspired that morning.
Danko Kovatch was talking about the intrinsic motivation (about which I already heard quite a few times), but still he left me with two important thoughts. The first one was that we are born motivated and should rather focus on how to stop demotivating people. The second one was that most managers are usually all willing to support their teams path to the mastery, but they just tend to forget to allocate some time for it ;-)
Lasse Koskela made me think about the different patterns of version control usage. What I liked the most was the fact that he put it in the context of agile principles expressed in the Manifesto.
Felix Russel did a good job reminding about the "definition of ready" and the time each product owner should spend on preparing stories before the team can actually swarm around them. It was one of the lighting talks during the second day, that I attended.
Rest of the time I spent listening to some stories at a small guerrilla open space session about "Beginner's Mind" set by Vasco Duarte by one of the flip-charts in the hallway. Vasco shared with me also some helpful ideas about the ALE network and how can it work with the local agile community that I will perhaps find some time and energy to reactivate in Wroclaw (who knows...).
Last but not least J.B.Rainsberger brought our attention to the idea that it not about what Agile is, but where and why it started. This made a perfect closing with a big XP (Extreme Programming) on the screen. At the end it can't work without strong development practices.
The 3rd season of AgileEE ends for me. Many thanks to Alexey, Nataliya and other people who made that happen!
