Agile2007 Conference – Day 1

I am at the Agile 2007 conference in Washington D.C. this week. After my attendance at last year’s event, I decided to make this conference a priority in subsequent years.

Research in Progress : Agile Practices and Projects

This year’s conference experience began, for me, by attending the morning session of the Research in Progress Workshop. This interesting session allows researchers to present their studies about agile practices or techniques to a room of people who then collaborate as teams to provide meaningful feedback to the researchers. The intent is to help guide the studies through feedback.

Studies that I was privy to this morning included:

Useful Sprint Metrics by Primevera (You may remember Primavera as one of the first large scale Scrum implementation cited by Ken Schwaber as far back as 2001)

Agile Metrics, Waste or Necessity?

Enterprise in Transition: Governance Meets Agile

The very nature of these studies demonstrates the maturity of Agile practices and the ongoing attempts by analysts to quantify the practices. This proves to me that one can over-analyze darn near anything, although the discussions prompted by these studies was informational for me. The people at this conference definitely know their business.

The Agile Architect Fishbowl Discussion

This session was conducted in a new-to-me format known as a Fishbowl Discussion. As someone who has facilitated panel discussions in the past, at code camps and other events, I found this new format to be an incredibly fresh take on the typical expert panel session. Participants discussed all the typical issues of the software architect in an Agile organization. These all boil down to questioning the need of a designated architect in a truly agile team environment. I do believe such a role is valuable, by the way. More about that in a later post, though.

My favorite metaphor of the day came out in this session and it is this: “The Winchester House in San Jose is the perfect example of following a vision without a plan.”

Agile Architecture Challenges

This session was the presentation of 3 case studies in Agile leadership delivered by the authors of the case studies about their particular companies. I have tried to distill each paper into one sentence.

Evolving into Embedded Development by Matt Fletcher of Atomic Object

Ruby, test first development, and we kick ass.

Traveling the Open Road: Build Organizational Development Capability Through Open Source by Phillip Smith of DTE Energy

In order to drive new technology adoption, formalize volunteer communities of leaders in that technology.

Agile Architecture, Changing Application Servers by Veljko Krunic of Rally Software

In order to successfully execute on a technology-driven infrastructure project like moving to an existing product to a new application server, do not pause your effort and allow at least one person to have complete and total focus on the migration.

All in all, I’d call this a successful day.  This was effectively a light day since most people were flying in today and the keynote is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Technorati tags: Agile, Agile2007, Agile Architecture, Software Architecture