AgileEE 2010 - Subjective Summary
AgileEE 2010 - the biggest agile conference in Central and Eastern Europe so far has ended. As we were there, we want to share some thoughts about this event with you.
The conference started on a Thursday evening with an ice-breaker party which was a great idea. But even the better idea was to organize a jam session where anybody could bring an instrument and play with speakers, organizers and attendants. First day started with two keynote sessions. One by Henrik Kniberg ("The Essence of Agile") and one by Mary Poppendieck ("It’s Not About Software"). Of course we could expect them to be high quality. However we must admit that Mary's was more interesting as it looked a bit into the future and into the shifting focus in agile world, while the Henrik's keynote more or less was a summary of the current state of the art. Nevertheless these two fit well together as they should have satisfied a diverse audience. From the first day two more talks (out of four we've attended) are worth mentioning as they were a high quality presentations. These were presented by Paul Klipp and Piotr Żołnierek. Both touched the difficult subject of dealing with fixed price world using the agile approach, but also were doing it from the different angles. Paul talked more about selling agile and shared some of his secrets from the phase before any contract is signed (if you caught Paul during the evening banquet you could hear a few more nice ideas). Piotr on the other hand presented some case studies from their real projects and how they dealt with fixed price environment during the project and still using the agile approach. The second day of the conference belongs definitely to Jurgen Appelo and his "The Big-Ass View on Competence and Structure”. Jurgen presented some concepts from his upcoming book. You should definitely watch the slides from his presentation as they may say a lot, but in fact we cannot wait to read the book which comes out in December 2010. There where also interesting talks given by Allan Kelly (about the BA role in agile process) and J.B. Rainsberger (about collaboration tests and contract test that should be used instead of integration tests). Allan's talk was important as it pointed out few things about what happens before the product owner rows a bunch of stories at the team. And Allan is right that there is not so much information about that part. Usually we start at the point where PO already knows what he needs to know (magic?). J.B's presentation was one of the few talks at AgileEE that were targeting agile developers. Also the way J.B. does his presentations (live hand drawing) is really good and keeps the audience more focused. To be true this was the point where we actually missed more such talks (more developer oriented and touching the craftsmanship movement) at AgileEE. The best would be to keep some more balance between the coaching or process oriented tracks and the more XP and engineering ones. How to sum it all up. The last edition of AgileEE (2009) had a theme which was "distributed agile". This year we would say it was more about excellence and shifting agile from process oriented movement into even more customer oriented one. This is probably the natural way as after almost 10 years for experiments we understand the processes and practices better now, so it's time to focus on what it was all about - the customer. AgileEE 2011 definitely will be worth visiting...
