Agile 2006 Conference – Day 1 Report

Day 1 of the Agile 2006 Conference was marginally valuable for our team.  While we
were unsure of what to expect, what we have have found has been primarily
amateurish presentations and divergent messages from the presenters.

Agile Practices 1

• David Hussman spoke about how he was a hippy and effectively laid out the case for
  Agile for people considering the adoption.  Rudimentary, but effective for those
  who needed it.  My favorite quote?  “Story cards are low-tech and
  hi-fi”.
• Mike Cohn laid out a structured model for Agile management and release planning for
  the un-initiated.  I really liked his idea of the planning onion, and the idea
  that estimates can be made in t-shirt sizes.  S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL needs to
  lose some weight.
• Brian Marick discussed Skilled Reasoning as Pattern Matching which was sufficiently
  complex as to confuse me.
• Sanjiv Augustine was so engaging that I forgot to take notes.  I forget what
  he said  

In Other News

The guys in the 4 hour hands on lab reported that the instructors were so ill prepared
to teach the session, that the session goal of demonstrating Test First Development
with Freebird (whatever that is) was never accomplished.  They claimed that
something called Freebird simplifies TDD, but never showed it.

Other team members got good overviews of Agile and several of the disciplines like
XP, Scrum, DSDM, etc.

Day 1 seemed to be the Late Night at the Apollo of Agile presentations, whether
the amateur was the presenter or the audience.  If you were an amateur in the
audience, you didn’t mind at all.