Monday, May 16, 2011

XP 2011 conference in Madrid: report of a newbie

Well, I have to admit that while I have been attending and even presenting on a couple of software conferences in the last few years, it was the first time I visited an XP conference. It was kind of that the idea struck me early in April 2011: there is an XP 2011 conference going on inMadrid, soon, they will talk about globalizing agile – this is just what I am doing in my daily work and what I am interested in, and on the other hand, XP means technical agile practices, and this is what our teams still need to develop more.

The intutive decision turned out to be quite good. I met many interesting people – some of the already known from ocasions like the AgileEastern Europe conference in Kiev, the Scrum Gatherings in Stockholm or Munich, or small events like the Agile Coach Camp Norway, or even from Siemens-internal agile conferences some years ago. And I met quite new persons, at least for me, who enriched my view of the agile world.

 













The XP conference seems to build a unique link between industry practicioners and university investigators. It is great to see how the Master or PhD students profit from the direct discussions with people who have global agile experience in the industry. On the other hand, it gives the industry people quick access to new research results.

There are several topics where I found particularly interesting information:
  • Agile and Leadership – here to mention the keynote from Esther Derby and the presentation from Jurgen Appelo
  • Industry reports – Even the ESA converted from waterfall to agile, as reported by Rui Santos and Marc-Elian Begin. In companies, I have now seen several times seen the agile release train by Dean Leffingwell applied – also in the report by Gabor Gunyho from F-Secure.
  • Agile coaching – a very practical workshop with Patrick Kua I had the pleasure to particpate in.
  • The initiative for creating a vision and rules for the recently born Agile and Lean Europe network (ALE) – and a lot of activites following up, including a new conference rotating through European countries, starting September 7.-9., 2011 in Berlin.
  • And last not least the results of my open space inquiry about Teaching TDD to a Team so that it sticks.
I will follow up to these topics with separate blog entries in the next couple of days, starting with the TDD open space.
(photos by Hubert Baumeister)

No comments:

Post a Comment