Agile North

On a Thursday in November the University of Central Lancashire held a gathering of the most passionate people around the agile space in the north. The number of attendees really surprised me at around one hundred, and seemed to indicate the northern IT industry is in a pretty healthy state. Based on the people that I talked to, it seems that only a small minority (i.e. 10% seemed to be thinking about adopting agile. A majority, probably around 75% seemed to be doing agile from a practices sense, although I got a sense most of them were still getting the hang of it.

A common theme for this conference seemed to be the focus on the more humane aspects rather than the technical challenges faced by teams. Roger Marlow talked about the need to cross pollinate the lessons learned from the social sciences while Chris Matts talked about the need to heal the relationships of delivery teams and the business, or more specifically the BA crowd.

The first keynote was, to be honest quite disappointing with the emphasis on why agile is good. In case the presenter hadn’t realised, a lot of people were already using agile practices, and the issue is actually how most people move beyond just the practices to the principles.

We hoped to address some of this by holding a session on acceptance testing intended to connect people with new ideas. I will be first to admit it fell a little short, with an overrun session effectively cutting into a third of our planned time and the expected audience more than double of what we had planned for. Still, I think there were some good topics and hopefully the write up proves useful for some people. I’ll get it posted to Agile North as soon as I can.

Other observations included many more people calling themselves agile coaches. It also struck me about how a lot of the talks were much less technical than other conferences I’d been to. I also learned that even with a great message some presenters had, delivery still matters and death by powerpoint still seems to be a popular method of execution. For those thinking about doing just presentations, there’s a really good website called Presentation Zen I think everyone should read. Either way, the bombardment of thirty (subtlety) different graphs reminded me of the excruciating pain I hear about agile projects that fail to practice continuous improvement… iterating in smaller batches, but missing the whole point of feedback and adapting to change.