Matt O’ Rama

My Agile2008 Notes on Evernote

mattgrommes’s public notebook: Agile2008Notes.

I’ve published my notes from the Agile2008 conference on Evernote. My handwriting is poor in these notes but the searching of the images that Evernote provides works on some things. If you’re interested in a particular session, try searching for it. Even if you don’t find it, the interface is pretty good for just scrolling through. Hopefully they’re useful!

Shades of grey

Outside the world of fanboys, people realize that most everything available sucks in one way or another, and most everything has a positive side, too. And while we all have our favorite technologies, most of us don't obsessively troll every thread that discusses them.

For example, Haskell on Linux is my language/platform combination of choice, but I am occasionally called on to write large amounts of Visual Basic at work on Windows systems. And while I don't like doing it, and I could give you a laundry list of things I hate about VB, there are also things about it that don't suck. Having an opinion and a preference doesn't mean that it can't be a nuanced opinion or preference.

I think the rest of reddit is frankly just sick and tired of hearing all about how much you hate technology X. Really, we don't give a shit.

808140 comments on Mono isn’t just for Apes.

One of the most promising things about the Agile2008 conference was the idea that Scrum and XP are really just on a spectrum of Agile methodologies, not completely black-and-white different things. I think what this Reddit user says is true for discussion Agile as well. Both camps need to get over themselves and realize they’re really just one camp.

Kim and I are going to speak on our experiences at Agile2008 at the meeting of the Agile New Mexico group next week and this is one of the topics I’ll be talking about. I think it’s great and since it was a big theme of Bob Martin’s keynote, I think people will actually listen.

Agile2008 Initial Thoughts

I just got back from Agile2008 in Toronto and boy, that was a great conference. I took almost 30 pages of notes and I’ve got tons of ideas on things we can do in our team at work. I’m going to write in more depth about the stuff I saw and learned but I wanted to say some quick things about my overall impressions.

For some great writeups on sessions (the kind of writeups I wish I was going to be doing) check out Gojko Adzic’s blog http://gojko.net. I met him at the conference and he’s a very sharp guy with a great blog.

My first big takeaway is the focus on engineering practices. We do Scrum at work which doesn’t set out any specific coding practices. At first I thought this was great, to leave the programmers alone to work as they wanted. And to be sure, I’m not advocating forcing a lot of practices on people where they might not fit. But overall, I’ve come around to thinking that a team should at least talk about doing things like test-first development, pair programming, etc. The benefits have been shown, it’s just a matter now of not doing something just to be doing it, but because it makes a real benefit. We’re going to start talking about these things soon.

The other thing I came away with was that we’re doing a pretty darn good job of being agile on my team. A lot of people I spoke to and heard have big problems with team dynamics and following the agile practices. We’re probably 80% of the way there but I think doing another 10-15% of agile methods would help us big time.

I’m going to have a lot of things to writeup and talk to my work about and I think we’ll be able to do a lot of agile things that will help us and the company out. We’re lucky that our Director is a programmer and knows to let us do things if we think they’ll help. We don’t have the kind of pushback from management that a lot of teams seem to have, which is great.

More later!