Few days ago I was honored to speak about Agile Planning on Agile Eastern Europe conference that happened in Kiev on 18th and 19th of September. I promised many people to share the conference photos, so here is a slideshow. I also added some pictures of the Kiev and its people to help you feel the atmosphere and showcase my great photo talent If you prefer looking at photos one by one, you can find them in this flickr collection.
I tend to go to one big agile conference a year (doing a PhD helps to add motivation). This year it is XP2009 - the premier European conference on all things agile. Usually I publish some reports either after or even before the conference. This year I got lazy extremely busy having a PhD symposium, a paper and a workshop to run and instead of a creative reporting I just let you see the photos to get a feeling of what the conference atmosphere was like.
If you wonder about the place, everything happens on a very lovely place on the Italian island Sardinia.
Unfortunately I am still bad with remembering people I don’t know very well, so if you recognize an unnamed person, tell his name in the comment and I’ll update the post. This post will be updated if I add more photos later.
First several random pictures of the people talking.
Not that we would be expecting many of you to do this, but if you have an Amazon Kindle , you can subscribe ($$) and have new articles on Agile Software Development automatically downloaded.
I find Kindle a fantastic idea. Be it available in my country and cost less, I would probably read books on it. I am not sure whether I would pay for reading blogs that are anyway available online for free, but then maybe you find it comfortable enough for paying. Anyway now you have the option. If anyone tries it, let us know in comments to this blog.
Several days ago during the over-the-beer-discussion after the latest Business Value Game workshop (it was a huge success and I am still looking for an assistant to help with it on XP2009) told me about this YouTube video (sorry, I don’t remember who exactly it was). It is humorously subtitled piece of movie about the last days of Hitler. With these subtitles Hitler seems to be extremely.. disappointed of how his team failed to follow the agile principles. As one of the commenters said “i can say this is so close to the truth it's scary!”. Have a look
If you want to be a successful software development company, you have to make sure you work on the stories that bring most value to the customer. Ideally you have an on-site customer that can tell you which story can bring most value. What do you do if you don't have luxury of having the on-site customer? Or how does on-site customer decide what is of the biggest importance to him? How does your company prioritize epics, stories and projects?
On XP2009 conference I will be running a game devoted to making participants feel the business value origins and flow. Players will form software development companies, prioritize their customers requests by business value and feel for themselves how different strategies help to earn money and maintain healthy relationship with the customers. This game has been run on several conferences and it always brings a lot of fun.
Register for XP2009 if you haven’t done so yet, come to this workshop and learn where the business value comes from.
Let me introduce a new permanent contributor to the site. We were lucky to get Mendelt Siebenga on board.
Mendelt Siebenga has been working as a software developer for close to ten years. For the last five years he has been applying practices and ideas from XP, Scrum and Lean in several adverse conditions like in fixed-price projects, teams distributed over several timezones and even during a SOX compliance implementation. Mendelt intends to cover particularly comprehensively the point of view of an agile developer acting as a change agent in a more traditional environment
Please, join me in welcoming Mendelt and take a look at his private blog as well.
Jurgen Appelo, a popular blogger and a former regular contributor to AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com is conducting a public survey on which practices people use and which practices are actually be considered to be the Agile ones. The survey consists of several parts, but you are free to take only some of them. Jurgen is known for handling data and calculations carefully so go fill the survey and help us all to understand which practices are actually used and which ones need more attention.
Agile requirements are different from the traditional ones and are usually defined as user stories that allow for slicing functionality in the shippable increments. There are recommendations for a standard user story format and the most known one is “As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>” popularized by Mike Cohn. The trend for recommending the common format is so strong that there is an evolution and there exist even hacks for making it work in the situations when it doesn’t fit naturally.
I used to be in the same camp of standard format proponents, until I noticed that more and more my stories look closer to “Implement list widget support” and further from “As an application designer I want to use a list widget so that…”.
We just got a new writer for AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com. His name is Jack Milunsky.
As COO and Scrum Master, Jack Milunsky heads software development at Brightspark. Jack is an early adopter of Scrum and has a great passion for early stage startups. Jack is co-creator of Agilebuddy, a next generation Scrum Application SaaS. Jack combines over 18 years of experience managing software development teams both large and small. Jack also writes to his own blog - check it out.
Last week a second Agile Dinner was held in Tampere. It eventually made me find time to publish photos and my lighting talk presentation from the first dinner that was held in Tampere on December 4 2008 and had a great success.
To make this post at least a bit useful to the people who haven’t been present on the dinner, let me share with you how easy it is to get an Agile community started. The plan consists of five steps:
Prepare a lighting talk to serve as a discussion starter. 5 minutes max
Create a wiki page for self registration couple of weeks in advance. Post announcement on the mailing list. Tentatively book a room in the local beer restaurant or bar (just for an hour or two)
A week later after seeing how many people register, book tables in the bar
![25052009043[1]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3342/3572844205_323e0135d1.jpg?v=0 "25052009043[1]")
, you can subscribe ($$) and have new articles on Agile Software Development automatically downloaded.
If you want to be a successful software development company, you have to make sure you work on the stories that bring most value to the customer. Ideally you have an on-site customer that can tell you which story can bring most value. What do you do if you don't have luxury of having the on-site customer? Or how does on-site customer decide what is of the biggest importance to him? How does your company prioritize epics, stories and projects?
Agile requirements are different from the traditional ones and are usually defined as user stories that allow for slicing functionality in the shippable increments. There are recommendations for a standard user story format and the most known one is 
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