Agile Business Conference 2008

More then a month later I finalized my summary of the conference. After writing a Dutch version for the company newsletter, I realized this would be a great time to start with a blog.

So without further delay here are, in my opinion, the topics that were talked about the most during the Agile Business Conference 2008.

Communication

An import aspect in successfully adopting agile is 'communication'. Several presentations mentioned that in a lot of companies there is a gap between 'the business' and 'IT'. To make agile work (and software projects in general) this gap needs to be closed. Especially because (in most cases) IT is a import part of the business (generates value).

Realism

Agile is not a silver bullet. It is method that can help you in many ways, but this shall always be dependant on the organization and the type of projects in which it will be applied. Having said that, it is important that we give the choice, of which development method to use, some proper thought.

Feedback

A recurring theme within several presentations is the feedback agile methods will give you. For example:

• Unit testing - feedback at developer level.
• Short development cycles - at customer client level (Rob Thomsett explained that customer is a swear word :))

Agile transformation

There are different approaches for transforming an IT organization to agile, top-down, bottom-up. Borland used a top-down approach where they started in one team and used the scrum master of that team as the agile evangelist to help other teams move to agile. Because upper-management fully supported this idea (but didn't make a mandate out of it), a large part of the organization is now using scrum. Even a team that was really skeptical asked for the help of the evangelist to help them with implementing scrum. Switching to agile is a change process, it doesn't happen overnight. The rate in which the company will change is totally dependant on the (culture of) the organization.