Report on Agile Conference 2008

Continuous improvement is important to the success of ifPeople, which led me to Agile 2008, a massive gathering of 1,500 people there to learn and discuss techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management / development sides of agile software development. The conference was organized like a music festival, with "stages" for key topics including Business Value, Distributed Agile, Quality, Leadership and Learning.

I learned a lot. What does an Agile coach do? Best practices for testing in an Agile project. Overcoming challenges of distributed teams. Quality, and how to achieve it, was a recurring theme in many of the sessions I attended. Mary Poppendieck, in reviewing the history of software development, concluded that systems engineering practices have been reliable while project management processes remain fragile (hint: make sure you are doing the proven stuff). Bob Martin in his keynote proposed a 5th item for the Agile Manifesto, namely "Craftmanship over crap" - that is, if we are to consider ourselves professionals, software developers need to use and insist on using proven techniques, including test-driven development and pair coding.

I met rock stars and people in the trenches. Legends Jeff Sutherland proposed a new form of Agile contracts; Ron Jeffries' workshop taught the value of releasing early; Linda Rising outlined tools for leading change in an organization. I now also have a network of people actively involved with distributed development, which I hope will continue the conversations and shared learning on this topic. People working together from multiple locations is hard to do well, and I appreciate the insights shared during the conference.

Agile 2008 showed me that there is much to learn about Agile's simple concepts and frameworks, and that Agile itself keeps evolving, which is a Good Thing. Agile, like its practitioners, needs to continuously improve so that it doesn't become another discarded fad (anyone remember JAD sessions and RAD tools?). I left Agile 2008 bursting with energy and plenty of ideas for making software development at ifPeople a more humane process, delivering higher value.