Coming back to Agile Eastern Europe was kind of a homecoming, and if you consider it’s my 2nd tour, how great it was.
A great professional conference, with great people, and the right size (for me). Enough to get to know people, and not feel overwhelmed.
The vibe was great, and for me I felt a few things clicking into place. I had a cool discussion about organization learning and growing with Carl Scotland, and great presentations on end to end development, from concept to value:
- Bjart Bogsnes on Beyond Budgeting
- Mattias Skarin on Concepts
- David Hussman on Frank Zappa, guitars, and getting values to customers
- Alistair Cockburn on Disciplined learning
- Paul and Ian Culling on building motivated culture in Version One
There were some off-beat but cool presentations I saw, like Mattias’ visualizations talk (what you see is not really what you get), or Peder Soholt’s “High Five Driven Development” talk. I’ve already implemented HFDD in my “Build a spaceship in TDD” class, worked great.
I’ve seen Liz Keogh’s (BDD, Real options and Cynefin) and Karl Scotland’s (Heuristics and kanban as common sense) sessions before but it’s better seeing them live. I also had the pleasure, like a true fan, to listen Alistair Cockborn talking about behind-the-scenes of the 2-day workshop that sparked the Agile Manifesto.
Things are falling into place and start fitting together for me. Different ideas I’ve collected and experiencing. It’s like connecting the dots between value streams, culture and management. I have a couple of ideas, no, experiments, I want to try.
I told Liz that all this topics have been coming together for me in the last 6 months, and she said it took her 9 years. I guess I’m on the right track.
Agile EE is my kind of conference. The right size, the right people, and the right topics.
Now, let’s make things happen.
PS: Slides for my talks are here: “Not the agile I used to know” and “Building a spaceship in TDD”.