Agile Mumbai 2010

I attended Agile Mumbai 2010 on 16 and 17 Jan. I gave a 3-minute lightning talk and also made it till the final round of "Programming with the Stars". I also enjoyed what the keynote speakers had to say and did a good amount of networking with fellow enthusiasts.

Overall I think the event has grown over the years. I was part of Agile Mumbai 2008 where I co-presented a workshop on refactoring, and being part of the event again this year, I've noticed improvements. Having international speakers definitely upped the quality of ideas and thoughts shared, and the attendees also seemed interested in stepping beyond the initial adoption curve.

Jeff Patton, David Hussman and J. B. did a great job of talking about stuff that goes beyond typical Agile practices.

Jeff introduced the technique of user story mapping and in general talked about introducing a "discovery" phase to projects. My key takeaways were

• the experience from the user story mapping role play: the quickness and effectiveness of the interviewing process
• the fact that physically laying out requirements as index cards can help the client realize how much software they wanted built and think about whether it's all necessary
• drawing lines across the story mapping wall to represent releases or priority can force people to rethink each feature's value and focus on only relevant stuff

David Hussman talked about his coaching experiences. His dislike for ScrumMaster tyrants was quite visible. What I liked best was his clear distinction of "skeptics" vs "cynics". The former are people who ask "why's", are open to ideas and learning but are not overzealous to blindly accept whatever books, blogs or coaches dish out. When convinced, these are people who will contribute to the enthusing of "agility" in projects and probably sustain it. The latter are folks who are beyond help and will only add negativity into teams and hinder success.

J.B. gave a session called "Stop it!" It listed out a few things that he believes have been tolerated long enough and need to be stopped right away. He thinks that those have gone on for so long despite evidence against them, that it doesn't even merit an explanation. Some examples were: not writing tests before code, using comments to explain what code is doing, breaking up working teams, and so on.

Besides these sessions, "Programming with the Stars" was a good addition to the conference. On both days, about one and a half hours were slotted for this event where preselected people were paired up for pair programming. Each pair had to showcase their pairing skills in front of the audience and judges within 6 minutes. After each pairing, judges openly shared their comments and scores. Top three pairs from the first day went on for the final round on the second day. The audience got a good idea of pairing from observing the pairs and hearing the judges. As a contestant, I appreciated getting to know my pair, Sanjiv, who I didn't know earlier, and also learnt a few things to keep in mind while pairing, thanks to the judges' feedback.

Although my pair and I came in second in the event, I'm glad that the 1st position went to a pair that included fellow-ThoughtWorker Rajesh. Everyone also enjoyed the "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly" of pair programming that Naresh Jain and J. B. demonstrated at the end of the event. It was a lot of fun.

Towards the end of the event, I attended a session by Pallavi and Nancy from Xebia about Agile Adoption Failures. It got some interesting discussions going on within the attendees but best of all, I loved the passion with which the speakers spoke of the problems they've witnessed while doing Agile consultation and ways in which these problems can be dealt with. It's always refreshing to see someone talk with such zest about what they do. It reminded me of my early days when I had just begun to learn about Agile and its wondrous ways.

The two-day event concluded with a panel discussion. What I took out of it was advice about how to network with other interested folks in your own cities and share stories with each other, especially about failures, and together evolve ideas for the better.

Tags: personal, technology:agile, technology:events, technology:talks Last modified 10:57 Tue, 16 Mar 2010 by AmanKing. Accessed 1,217 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.