I’ve been having troubles posting things to my blog due to Internet access here, but this entry was written just after Sweden and England drew in the world cup (equivalent of midnight here in Finland), so here’s the recap of today’s goings on:

• Barry Boehm’s keynote – An interesting discussion in which he discussed different analysis models that could still be used in agile, considering risk management and balancing agility and discipline. He talked about the scaling of agile to scrum of scrums and research indicating where agile is most applicable.
• Panel of Notable Agile Leaders including (Angela Martin, Rachel Davies, Jutta Eckstein, David Hussman, Emmanuel Gaillot, Mary Poppendieck and Michael Feathers) holding a fantastic discussion on Politics and Religion in Agile Development. A lot of the advice they gave and their own ‘war stories’ struck a chord with me so much in my experiences and different projects I’ve worked on. It was great for them to all be so honest and give their opinions. Kudos to Angela for being an excellent moderator for the session!
• Value Stream Mapping – An excellent exercise with Mary Poppendieck, involving identifying waste in an entire value chain (i.e. when a customer requests a features and they are using it), and more interestingly the strategies or areas of focus for particular project examples.
• Coder’s Dojo – Coming half way through this session, I still had lots of fun with this hands of workshop presented by Christophe Thibaut and Emmanuel Gaillot. We did a bit of dynamic language group pairing adhering to a small set of well defined rules that I found fascinating from many different perspectives, most especially the social one.
• Final keynote by Jack Jarvik discussing methods he applied in the early 1990s that appear aligned or similar to many of the XP/Scrum practices.

What can I say, but what another fantastic day?