Carnival of the Agilists – Agile 2007 wrap up
I delayed last weeks Carnival to allow me to cover all the interesting Agile 2007 Wrap ups that are out there. As 
many bloggers have noted the overwhelming theme seems to have been: Scaling and Distrubted Agile/Lean.
After reading for an hour I can’t find any great ordering or sets of themes so instead I will put these out in the order I found them:
Mishkin Berteig summarizes and comments on Mary’s great talk: Agile 2007 Conference Notes – Mary Poppendieck on Leadership.
Ben Carey (TheSherpaProject) wrote Agile 2007 – Parting Thoughts. Ben and I will differ when it comes to the conference organization. I think the food was better than suggests – I also know that the organizers opted not to give out bottled water to avoid waste. Instead glasses and either jugs or coolers of water were everywhere.
Tony Baer (CBR Online) wrote Agile 2007: Agile practices travel full circle. Tony talks about the Agile practices moving from IT back to manufacturing. May we continue to learn from each other.
Jack Ganssle (Embedded.com) wrote: Agile 2007 catered mostly to PC types, but some embedded heads showed up.
Alan Ridlehoover wrote: Agile 2007: The First Thing to Build – Trust on Agile Teams for Alan the stand out point of Diana’s session: Individuation. Individuation is the process of getting to know someone as a person, finding out what differentiates them as an individual. Without individuation, all you have to judge someone are the stereotypes and prejudices that you carry with you. (And, I with me.) In order to truly trust someone, you must get to know them personally. Great reminder – I was in the same session and needed to be reminded of this point.
Pete Behrens wrote: Agile Transformation @ Salesforce.com – I had the privilege of hearing Steve speak during Pete’s session. What an amazing story – think of a large successful Big Bang rollout and you will get the idea. My hat goes off to Steve, Chris and Pete (who coached them).
Cory Foy has: Wrapup from Agile 2007
Michael Maximilien has written an entry about his paper: A Longitudinal Study of the Use of Test-Driven Development Practice in Industry. He claims to have proven the value of TDD over a long period of time and also in reducing complexity.
Naresh Jain is Honored to receive the 2007 Gordon Pask award. Naresh remarks on how Richard Stallman has inspired his work in the Agile world.
Curious Bunny likes JB’s talk Greatest Misses 2000-2007.
Johanna Rothman Is the Question You Asked What the Candidate Heard?
From the mock objects blog: AtomicObject use mocks for Embedded C
Brian Lyons: Shu-Ha-Ri: Learn Detach Transcend
Brian Marick: Pask Award 2007 (plus a surprise)
Jason Gorman gently pokes Ron Hulen in Agile 2007 Fun with Statistics. Basically Jason’s just because everyone at the conference has worked on an Agile project doesn’t mean its reached the mainstream (in my mind >25% market share). However from a small informal survey I did asking people what they noticed in their city or market niche. In some cities and some markets Agile is now mainstream. For what its worth I think Ron was really only saying that he was pleasantly surprised at the knowledge of his fellow attendees.
Luke Hohmann (whose picture needs updating) complains of "Business Value" buzzword bingo. He suggests that we’re far too complacent. Basically just because its in your backlog doesn’t mean it delivers value.
In Agile Model Evolution David Anderson challenges to think about what we’ve learned in the six years since the manifesto was written. Are there missing clauses? David would highlight Trust and Teams.
Amanda Wilson brings a "newbies" perspective to the conference.
SDTimes has a podcast that mentions the conference. I don’t have the time for podcasts so your mileage may vary.
Kent McDonald has a video of his session "Is Agile Agile?". I don’t videos either
Ade Miller says: "If you’re not in the team room, you’re not on the team".
Ken Clyne asks "Are you Stonecutter or a Cathedral builder?".
Ken Judy picks up a remark Ken Schabwer made in "Women & Agile Programming"
Someone at Software Integrity posted some interesting observations on "Benefits of Pair Programming". Added bonus – Uncle Bob chimes in with an excellent comment that basically says if pair programming isn’t being widely adopted as the Sr. Programmers why not. Where the lead most others will happily follow.
Finally try my own humble efforts – only two and half days covered so far: "Why I don’t like Monday’s" – Agile 2007 Day 1, Agile Transitional Leadership and Value Stream Mapping – Agile 2007 Day 2, Test Driven Development for Large Scale GUIs Agile 2007. More to come including coverage of Jeff Sutherland’s talk, Mary Poppendieck’s energizing talk and discovery sessions on Distributed Planning and Distributed Teams.
Ok I’m exhausted. Time to do the dishes.
Update I found a few more interesting posts.
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August 21, 2007 at 10:05 pm | Ben Carey
I didn’t realize that the water was in jugs and coolers. I can certainly applaud the logic behind decreasing the number of wasted bottles. Maybe an Agile 2007 water bottle in the welcome kit would have helped the cause a bit.
I’m all for decreasing the environmental impact, but things like recycling stations and awareness would have probably been better tactics. I really appreciate the effort that everyone put forward in organizing the conference, but I guess I just expected more.
August 22, 2007 at 11:53 am | Mark Levison
Ben – What more did you expect? I was fairly happy. Perhaps on the food front I would have like to see healthier options: Whole grained bread instead of pasty white bagels etc. But mostly it was good.
As for awareness I think you’re right. I knew about the bottled water situation because it got announced before Susan’s keynote. Better messaging would have help.
Perhaps we should a retrospective- I’m serious.
Finally I believe that before we write about the conference we should remember the Retrospective Prime Directive:
“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
August 22, 2007 at 1:32 pm | Ben Carey
I guess it’s hard to please everybody
August 26, 2007 at 7:46 pm | Robin Dymond
Thanks for putting together the carnival Mark. On our site we posted some impressions for Monday’s Product Owner Training http://www.innovel.net/?p=16. We had a really great response to the new course. Monday had a ton going on but only in the afternoon, it would have been better to have some sessions Monday morning.
September 7, 2007 at 8:15 pm | Alan Ridlehoover's Blog
More to come!
I’m still working on my posts summarizing the Agile 2007 sessions. But, I’m also trying to ship some
August 25, 2007 at 12:08 pm | George Dinwiddie's blog
Carnival of the Agile Conference
The new Carnival of the Agilists is focused on the Agile 2007 conference. Youll find a bunch of references to blogs discussing the conference. Theres some interesting stuff. Theres even a pointer to my good friend, Jack Ganss…