Agile 2006 Conference Notes,Wednesday, July 26th
Lean Software Development
I intended to attend MaryPoppendieck lecture on Lean Development. Although excellent, most of the content being presented and explained was pretty close to what I am familiar with - via reading her writings and via attending her (another very valuable) Lean Development workshop that KyleLarson helped organize. I briefly chatted with Mary during the AgileStories session - where she noted that the sales of her first book has seen an increasing uptick every month since the launch. I am not surprised, since LeanThinking is fundamental for being competitive in this increasingly "flattened" (using Friedman's concept) world . Search for "lean" on this site if you are interested and you should hit a couple of pages and labels about lean.
Anyway, following the LawOfTwoFeet , I followed them to where I thought I would find value: The Vendor Area
 | There were a couple of people from yesterday's presentations who were referencing EliyahuGoldratt's work on TheoryOfConstraints - I gotta follow up |
The Vendor ware
Green Pepper
I am neutral on the vendor wares this time. However, a couple of them caught my attention : Green Pepper . They seemed to have integrated a couple of my favorite tools - Confluence and "FIT"-like acceptance testing tools. I talked to "Franc" the owner and "the guy" - we decided we will follow up with each other. If you are interested in finding out why I would be excited give me a holler , or leave me a comment at the end of this page.
Industrial Logic
From there, my mind followed my feet to http://IndustrialLogic.com's booth. I have always liked [JoshuaKirievsky]'s work especially in software patterns and most importantly his work on Refactoring towards patterns. What MartinFowler introduced with his book - the idea and value of Refactoring code, Joshua's work shows how I would evolve my software to become a system of patterns. I met with <who?> , who was patient with my questions and have a todo item to followup with http://industrialLogic.com's offerings.
CCPace
The next stop was at CCPace . I first ran into http://CCPace.com when they published some very insightful papers on complexity, chaos, order (gotta get links). Then I happened to come upon SanjivAugustine's excellent book on agile project management - Sanjiv's thoughts resonate with me because of my interest in [PeterSenge]'s work and a general (rapidly deepening) interest in Synchrony and what results in QWAN. With so many big companies in the twin cities, and the "Lean duo (Poppendiecks)"'s home and with DavidHussman , KyleLarson etc. there is a great opportunity for a consulting practice in Lean-Agile . CCPace and ATI should catch the opportunity staring in their face. But then several people say I imagine a lot of things...maybe there is none. Anyway then my eyes locked onto a booth that said http://rallydev.com . Turns out it is an electronic/online toolset for agile project management. So, you have a scrum, XP project? Call them up, sign up for a hosted plan and off you go. Your team now has a common platform to track your agility - globally. You could now have a fractal organization and not worry about information flow (assuming you are not talking about dysfunctional orgs ). I like it. The usability seemed quite good. The screens and workflow seems to have evolved from industry-feedback. It automates some of the time-consuming tasks you would spend ( manipulating spreadsheets etc. ) for figuring out the project analytics. Has an open web-services api - that too REST-based (I am pleasantly surprised to see the lighter protocol gain momentum - SOAP is getting to be a bit slow for the rapid service oriented world we are moving into ). Ha, after all the the entire WWW is based on the REST paradigm. See RoyFielding's work and TechnologyLinks for some REST URLs. They also have integration with FIT and [FitNesse] testing frameworks, so we could pump information back into the project performance knowledgebase. I am going to check-out Rally dev to see if they could be of use to some of my clients. After that I wafted to http://versionOne.com booth . Talked to the VP of sales and marketing. Apparently they have a big list of big clients (which explains the # of dollars they are spending on advertisement at the conference) . They would be competing in the same space as Rally . They have a hosted model as well as a per/user installation model. Looked like they were competitively priced with Rally - but then I have learnt to distrust numbers fed to me. Overall, the product looked quite useful - comes with industry-standard templates - for Scrum, XP ... and other project methods.
ATI
I then went to one of the companies I have worked for off and on - one of my favorite and forward-looking, agile companies - http://atico.com. I talked to Vern who is the staffing manager. Going through their brochure was quite interesting - I did not realize how extensive their client list is! I also like the direction they are heading towards. Perhaps with a forum for them to expose their consultant's enormous depth and breadth of talent - more clients could leverage the services they have to offer. KyleLarson, MichaelNygard, DionStewart, MarkusSilpala, EricRunquist, JasonSelby, RobSigel - some of the best talent in town are or were associated with ATI. Its my privilege to have worked with these guys - they pushed me beyond my comfort zone, constantly creating chaos out of which I have managed to eke out some order - only to have become a better person. Thanks, guys!
Gotta go: Its 1:10pm and I gotta rush - grab lunch and attend the afternoon session - following the LawOfTwoFeet
Autochthony
Attended PamRostal and DavidWilliams' presentation about Autochthony : 
. Its not as difficult as it sounds. It was a very interesting presentation that made a lot of sense to me and address my current organizational change problems in an enterprise. I perceive the method to provide an analytic toolbox to do an objective evaluation along several dimensions and utilizes our knowledge-base (in the form of patterns) and then go about pruning the solution space to come up with candidate patterns that may be applicable. The work is open source. Have to follow-up. The concept of QualityWithoutAName did come up, although I do not recall in what context - perhaps when the discussion of the self-similar structures of people organizations came up.
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