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.
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.
Tips and facts after from the company wide adoption of Scrum at Yahoo! Captured during the Gabrielle Benefield's keynote on Scan-Agile. During the adoption period, Gabrielle Benefield was Senior Director of Agile Development at Yahoo!, co-leading the company’s large-scale corporate adoption of Scrum, which now encompasses more than 200 teams projects and over 1,500 employees in the US, Europe, and India. Tips should be mostly applicable for similarly sized enterprises, though generally useful for smaller companies as well.
This Wednesday on the first Scandinavian Agile conference in Helsinki I was running an open space session about what works and what doesn't work with distributed and/or outsourcing teams. During the two hours we had an excellent discussion with many people in various roles from offshore customers to ones working in an outsourcing company to people being pushed to distribute, from product managers to Scrum Masters to developers.
A lot of the discussion results are intangible and stay in the heads of the participants and I didn't record the excellent discussion on feature teams VS component teams VS functional teams in the case of distribution. Here is the brief summary of what was commonly acknowledged to be working and not working in cases of offshoring and distribution. Use at your own risk.
I like going to the conferences. Every year I try taking part in one major conference and one or more smaller events devoted to the agile movement. Reading the books, articles and web-sites like this one is important, but I find that getting together on the conferences and similar types of gatherings is an own indispensable experience. If you happen to be at least moderately social, couple of conference days, lunches and evening parties help you get to know so many people and teams that you would not be able to meet in a year otherwise.
This week I am in London attending the Agile Business Conference. A few weeks ago I got to attend Agile 2008 in Toronto. Over the next few weeks I will be at the APLN Leadership Summit in Atlanta, the PMI Global Congress in Denver, the Vancouver Agile Conference, and the Better Software Conference down in Orlando.
That is a lot of conferences, a lot of speakers, and a lot of presentations.
Today Scan-Agile, the first large North European conference opened its registration page. It is going to take place in Helsinki on October 29. It has an excellent set of speakers, that include Gabrielle Benefield - a former director of Agile development in Yahoo! and Bas Vodde - an expert on all things large scale. It has an open space, practitioner and awareness tracks and because of being run by a non-profit organization, it is cheap (just 200 euros). If you happen to be around Finland in the end of October, consider spending a day on the conference.
I was going to add some motivational story with a moral that would make you think about visiting a conference, but Vasco Duarte, one of the conference organizers and Agile expert with many years under the belt did it already. Go read his story about why his grandpas would love the conference and consider registering while there are still seats left.
Agile 2008 that was held last week was the largest and the most influential conference on the Agile ways of developing software. After such big events bloggers often present their impressions and and observations. You will find the links to more reports below and meanwhile let me present you my impressions on what changed in Agile lately.
Trends
During the last year Agile methods definitely crossed the chasm and at the moment are definitely accepted at least as yet another legible way to create software. On the conference several clear trends were pretty obvious [for me at least].
Today I presented the paper written by me and Pekka Abrahamsson. The paper tells about our experience in adopting Scrum in a multi-team multi-project environment within a large corporation and in a research intensive team. We focus on particular challenges to expect when adopting Scrum in such an environment, check the paper out if you are about to try Scrum in a multi-project situation - there is a concrete list of what to pay attention to. What I personally love most about the article is that since it has been officially approved by my daytime employer I can now freely talk in public about a part of my experience and don't need to hide behind "what a known telecommunication company could do".
![25052009043[1]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3342/3572844205_323e0135d1.jpg?v=0 "25052009043[1]")
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?
This Wednesday on the first 
Agile 2008 that was held last week was the largest and the most influential conference on the Agile ways of developing software. After such big events bloggers often present their impressions and and observations. You will find the links to more reports below and meanwhile let me present you my impressions on what changed in Agile lately.
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