me.andering – Willem van den Ende

Marc already has the scoop, details and a pretty word cloud to explain the theme, so I’ll keep it short and simple. The next Agile Open conference in the Netherlands will be September 10 & 11, in Baarn.

We chose the theme ‘my method is bigger than yours… or is it?’ because it seems that as this agile software development thing goes mainstream more and more people lose sight of what we perceived was one of the underlying goals of the Agile Manifesto: get continuous experimentation and learning going by developing software and helping others do it across communities – hence the signing by people involved in all ‘lightweight’ methodologies at the time. We like the Named clouds meme and hope it spurs some discussions.

Even if this theme does not speak to you, come to Agile Open Holland anyway – anything goes, and new cloud formations are likely to form during the conference. Named ones in the sessions and the hallways, unnamed ones in the sky (we do hope the sun shines most of the time though..).

A newsletter is much like software – if you create a larger batch of items, the work grows more than linearly (editing, translating, scrolling, selecting). It’s still worth it though – creating the newsletter on a regular basis helps to reflect on what we’ve done, but also creates focus: what are we going to do or research to make the next one interesting…. The positive response we’ve gotten so far also helps. Marc was kind enough to create a wordle to reveal more of the content:

QWAN newsletter topics, according to wordle

Maybe because of the delay (we skipped May eventually) we not only have more items, they are also longer. We try to keep the newsletter short, but the things we discussed at conferences and while making the product development training gave us some inspiration to explain some topics in more detail. If the topics pique your interest, you can read it online or subscribe.

One of the things that made the xp2009 conference exceed my expectations was the beach. Here you can see photos from thursday, May 28th – Patrick Kua hosted an Open Space session on ” is there a lean versus agile versus kanban divide?” that turned into one of the best sessions of the conference. The guys from agical organized an unplanned barbecue, which was great; most participants were there, and the hotel management was very supportive.

I’ll process and post the rest of the photos when time permits – I decided not to do everything in a big batch this time (which sometimes means the batch never gets executed and photos are not published). Tomorrow Marc and I depart to Luzern, Switzerland for the first instance of our Agile Product Development training, so there is not much time left.

In our quest to put into words and pictures how important context is to choose practices, to show that there is no one-size-fits all solution for process and change strategy, Marc Evers and me went on tour last year with a presentation on Cultural Patterns. Take a look over at InfoQ – Beyond Agile: Cultural Patterns.

Willem and Marc introduce cultural patterns that can be found in software organizations. By understanding the cultural patterns then you can better adapt your practices. (more…)

I haven’t gone to XP200* for a while. This year is different   It has a very strong programme with an excellent balance between practitioner workshops and tutorials and a more focused academic track. Amongst other things, sessions by agile regulars like Jeff Patton on User Story Mapping, David Anderson on Kanban, the Poppendiecks on Lean, Diana Larsen on Retrospectives, Steve Freeman on Mocks, american Mike Hill on CRRAP as well as  workshops by  people you may not yet have heard about: the Scrum Board Game by Wim van de Goor and Stefan van den Oord looked like a lot of fun at the last XP Days Benelux, and the Agile Analysis tutorial by Joke Vandemaele should be very good as well – she is part of a ‘new wave’ of what I call example driven business analysts (a shorter version will also run at mini XP Days in Mechelen, May 11). And there is an Open Space of course, for the latest and greatest insights and the most difficult of problems.

It’s back in Sardinia, in the beautiful town of Pula so the place itself is worth a visit – I was in Sardinia once for XP2001 – it is stunning.

looking to the Sea from Pula fourtress by Alistair Young

Temple of Augustus, Pula by yellow book ltd

Spa 2009 was an experience grenade, I am somewhat recovered from the blast I had there, but not quite, so here are some impressions and photos.

Haskell

This years’ conference had many sessions on a hitherto rather obscure programming language: Haskell. I knew the guys from the Paris CodingDojo (at the very least EmmanuelGaillot, ChristopheThibaut and ArnaudBailly ) have been jamming on Haskell for a while, I was surprised to learn Ivan Moore and Mike Hill, this years’ programme chairs also have taken an interest in it.

I am not exactly sure why. (more…)

A bit late, as the first conference – SPA2009 – has already passed . It was great, more about that later. We already put the write-up for Consulting Without Secrets up on the SPA wiki, Sea Stories and Fairy tales is yet to follow. (more…)

Raphaël Pierquin has scanned the first batch of session notes from Agile Open France.
Some of the attendees are excellent (visual) note takers – even notes of sessions I did not attend speak to me. Enjoy (works best if you can read a bit of French, although the glyphs also speak volumes)

Does this look like a place of work to you?

Hotel Arnold at dawn

To me neither. This was my place of work for three days during Agile Open France.  The effect it has on me is hard to explain, I hope the pictures help paint a clearer eh, picture.

(more…)

Marc and I just got word from Jason Gorman, that our session Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects has been accepted for the conference that has outlawed index cards, post-its and lego: the Software Craftsmanship Conference in London, February 26.

The year is getting off to a good start – we did an iteration on the session proposal January 1st. To fit with the spirit of the conference, we’ve added a coders’ dojo to it. I look forward to going back to the BBC site, having facilitated in-house dojos before.

I’m still wondering what happened with our other proposal – the continuous integration install party. It might not have gotten through, but I guess we could run it as a BoF (possibly at the SPA conference in April, also in london).