Saturday, August 29, 2009

Agile 2009 - Summary

Overall I think this conference was well worth going attending. On average most of the attendees were new to agile. It is refreshing to see their excitement during the sessions. In particular I found Alistair Cockburn's session on story slicing very helpful. Take home message - next time you work on a story try to demo it to yourself every 15 minutes to showcase a visible difference (even if only a small one).

Sumeet Moghe co-presented the Distributed Agile Game. I always love to present with Sumeet as he is one of the best facilitators I know. I think the participants all got the lessons of how painful the distributed situation can be, but also how to remedy common communication problems.

Well I'm hanging up my conference hat for this week, but I'm back at it in late September or early October for Microsoft's TechDays. I'll be talking about my current technical passion ASP.NET MVC.

2 comments:

Mark Needham said...

"next time you work on a story try to demo it to yourself every 15 minutes to showcase a visible difference (even if only a small one)."

This sounds quite interesting.

Would that mean that we would try to always try to finish a little bit of work all the way through the app from UI to back end instead of writing the code for each layer and moving onto the next one?

Seems to fit in quite nicely with the ideas of quick feedback etc.

Jonathan McCracken said...

Yeah I think that's the idea.

Alastair was very clear on that point exactly. Actually show the customer (or in this case yourself) a real demo of working functionality. No more "technical" stories like "get database working" because you can't show that to a customer.

I don't think it works for all cases. For example, how about large data migrations which are inevitably part of most projects?

The idea was refreshing though, and next time I get a story I'll try to "slice it" thinner than I have in the past.