Reflections on Agile 2013

13 August

I’m flying across the USA as I write this, having just spent a busy, tiring, exciting, inspiring, awesome week at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville where I joined 1785 like-minded people from 38 countries at the Agile 2013 conference.

This post is a way to get my thoughts in some sort of order and share some of the highlights from the week.  I will be posting more detailed recaps from a few of the talks and there is a summary of the vendors who exhibited at the conference (which includes Software Education for the first time) on InfoQ.

The annual Agile 20XX conference is the week of the year where all the hats I wear come together, and is always a really busy time for me.

The week started for me on the day before the conference with an Agile Alliance board meeting, during which I met our newest board member Juan Banda, from Bolivia. Juan is another passionate and committed agilist who brings his unique perspective to the board, and I’m really looking forward to working with him over the next three years. He blogs about things Agile and Scrum here and is very generous in sharing his presentations online.

We said goodbye to the two board members who left the board at the end of their terms.  Esther Derby and Diana Larson have provided wonderful support and guidance to the board and served the Agile community selflessly over the last seven years, and they will be deeply missed. Their deep understanding of human systems, their generous sharing of knowledge and experience and their gentle touch in keeping the board focused on achieving our goals of supporting the global Agile community have been wonderful lessons for me and for all the rest of the board. Thank you both, we promise to keep the fires you’ve lit burning and well-tended.

After the board meeting, the program organizers and track chairs got together to hold a retrospective about the program selection process. An important ingredient for Agile Alliance conferences is the way the program is built. Sessions are submitted by the community and there is an open review process whereby anyone can view the session proposals and contribute.  The submission process is designed to help potential speakers improve their talks rather than trying to filter them out.

Catherine Louis and I chaired the Working with Customers track; we received over 70 proposals and had to trim them down to a final set of 17 that made up the track. Our reviewers did a wonderful job providing feedback to the submitters which helped them raise the bar on the talks, which meant it was really hard to make the selections – exactly what we wanted as track chairs. We faced the happy problem of selecting a set of talks which covered the track topics from a great selection of proposals.

Thank you to all the submitters, and if your talk was not selected that was not because it wasn’t good, but because we had to be ruthless in our selections.

The conference as a whole received over 2000 proposals and we ended up with 210 sessions in 17 tracks, and the feedback from attendees over the week has been that the organizers got it mainly right.

Sunday evening ended with a reception for the sponsors, thanking them for their contribution through the exhibition of their products, expressing the Agile values of collaboration and communication. The sponsor organisations are an important part of the conference – there’s an interesting buzz in the exhibitor hall, competitive but friendly and having fun together as well. Having been an exhibitor at a number of other conferences around the world over the years I think this is somewhat special to the Agile conference, organisations living the Agile values.

For the first time Software Education was a sponsor this year, and we certainly had fun on the stand. We had a big team representing the company: Andy Cooper, Sharon Robson, Michi Tyson, Craig Smith, Pete Tansey and myself all spent time talking to conference attendees, playing Demming’s Red Bead experiment (which is about getting the impediments out of the system before starting the work rather than trying to debug it afterwards) and handing out hundreds of packs of Agile sizing cards.

It was heartwarming to see the number of people who have been friends of SoftEd who were at the conference – many of our conference speakers from over the years were at the conference and stopped by the stand to welcome us and say hello.

This year there were three keynote talks, by Abhi Nemani (Monday), Tim Lister (Wednesday) and Gene Kim (Friday).  I’ll write about these and the sessions I attended separately, so watch this space.

Another characteristic of the conference is the busy social schedule that goes along with the program.  This week was no exception and as sponsors, the SoftEd team were very busy during most of these.

Monday evening was the icebreaker reception and the first opportunity for attendees to walk around the exhibitor hall and see what we had on offer.  The image of Sharon delivering an impromptu training session on how to use sizing cards for estimating user stories and of Michi telling people that they’re fired for getting too many red beads will be cherished for time to come.

Tuesday was an evening off for the exhibitors, with no planned conference activities. This opens up the opportunity for the big players to compete with each other on their hospitality and parties – tickets to the VersionOne boat ride were highly sought after (I had to give mine away as I was being responsible and worked with Steve Adolph to finalize our talk for the Wednesday afternoon), Rally Software took over one of the bars in the hotel and served great food and drink, Valtech also took over a restaurant and had Dean Leffingwell as host and LeanKit hired a bridge in the centre of Nashville as their party venue.

Wednesday evening the focus was on the exhibition hall with the Music City Concert Tour event. Attendees needed to get autographs from sponsor booths to complete their dance cards to go into a draw for prizes at the end of the day. There were also impersonators of a variety of country and western stars wandering around the hall, along with a panda:

Thursday night was the conference party – this is a much-anticipated event at which each conference chair tries to outdo previous events. This year it was at the Wildhorse Saloon in downtown Nashville.  The logistics of moving 1700+ people to the city centre and back are impressive and it went pretty smoothly. The food was great, Southern BBQ, the drink flowed freely and imagine hundreds of Agilistas line dancing (or not line dancing).

Friday morning was fairly subdued with lots of delicate heads around.  The 09:00-10:15 sessions for the Friday were crowdsourced – attendees were able to vote for sessions to be repeated from earlier in the week, and propose alternate sessions which had not made it onto the program. For me, this meant I was finally able to see Liz Keogh talk about BDD, Feature Injection and Real Options.

After the closing keynote, many goodbyes were said – it was sad to part from friendships made and renewed among the Agile tribe.

Friday afternoon we had another short Agile Alliance board meeting briefly reflecting on the conference and planning the next board year.

Three of the SoftEd contingent stayed behind for the weekend, so on Saturday Craig, Pete and I had a road trip to Huntsville, Alabama to visit the Space and Rocket Centre.  This is where Werner van Braun designed and oversaw the building of the US rocket arsenal and the space program vehicles. They have two full Saturn V rockets on display – one standing outside fully assembled and one inside a purpose-built a building so you can see the construction. Geek heaven!

The captain’s just announced we’re landing in LA soon, so I’ll wrap up here.

Watch this space as there is more to come about the content of the sessions . . .

 

Posted by Shane Hastie

 

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