Agile Cambridge 2010
On Thursday October 14th 2010 I attended the first day of a two-day event called Agile Cambridge 2010. The sessions I attended were;
- Keynote: Test Engineering at Google – James A. Whittaker (Google)
- Tutorial: What does it take to be an Agile company? – Allan Kelly (Software Strategy)
- Experience Report: Building Effective Habits Through Peer Group Learning & Assessment – Jason Gorman (Codemanship Ltd)
- Experience Report: Five years of change, no outages – Steve Freeman (M3P) & Andrew Jackman (Insane Logic)
- Experience Report: Agile is a journey not a destination – Paul Grenyer (Validus)
- Experience Report: Creating a brand new product using Scrum and Agile practices – Mark Wightman (Red Gate Software) & Stephanie Herr (Red Gate Software)
Firstly some praise for the location. The event was hosted in the Murray Edwards college, the conference facilities are great. The main conference theatre is great.
After the usual coffee welcome the first session of the day was the Keynote from Google.
Test Engineering at Google – James A. Whittaker (Google)
James gave a great insight in to how Google go about their testing, who is involved etc. If I had to personify a Google big wig, James was that personification. Google are a big fish and whilst the key-note was both entertaining and educational – it was so far detached from the reality that I am in at the moment (small company) that it had little relevance to me at the moment. Great start to the day though.
What does it take to be an Agile company? – Allan Kelly (Software Strategy)
I was hoping this would be more focused on how to implement Agile techniques around a dev team in a company, turns out it was more around how a whole company can be more Agile. It was educational none the less and once I switched from techie mindset to business-business-business it all started to become relevant and valuable. Allan had some good ideas, all of which have been banked and will be used to my advantage some time soon!
Building Effective Habits Through Peer Group Learning & Assessment – Jason Gorman (Codemanship Ltd)
This session was focused around TDD and how as a group you can learn to run TDD better. Another great presentation, but not much value to me at the time.
Five years of change, no outages – Steve Freeman (M3P) & Andrew Jackman (Insane Logic)
Honestly? Complete waste of time. 2 guys barking on about how they ran the perfect implementation project without actually giving much of an insight as to how! Basically they spent the whole time blowing their own trumpet. The delivery of the presentation was pretty dire too, a good presentation is engaging visually and audibly as well as educational. The lack of questions asked at the end highlighted my point.
Agile is a journey not a destination – Paul Grenyer (Validus)
Jackpot. This is the kind of session I was hoping for. Paul took us through the journey that Validus were on as they developed a team and product. It was insightful and gave me a good confidence boost for my current goals. Paul and his team are a few steps a head of us, but taking the same path. Paul was easy to approach at the end of the session too and we had a good chat about various aspects of how Agile works for each of us. I learnt a few things from this session and felt it was the most valuable of the day.
Paul has added his own blog entry about the session; http://paulgrenyer.blogspot.com/2010/10/agile-cambridge-agile-is-journey-not.html
Creating a brand new product using Scrum and Agile practices – Mark Wightman (Red Gate Software) & Stephanie Herr (Red Gate Software)
The last session of the day for me was a good end to the day. A product that is for SQL Server is always of interest to me and it was great to hear how RedGate turned their product around from concept to shipped product before their competitors released their own products.
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