Agile Goa 2005 - Report
Tuesday, June 14th, 2005One day introductory conference on agile, 55 plus delegates, 30 computers science lecturers from 12 different universities from all over India, 25 plus software professionals from Goa and beyond, 9 speakers/coach from 3 different companies from Bangalore, lots of interactions, fun, learning and more!
This is a quick summary of Agile Goa 2005. What started off as mission, “bring agile to Goa“, was well accomplished.
Agile Goa 2005 was second of its kind in India. The Agile Software Community of India [ASCI] is driving these conferences, with the objective of spreading agile awareness to different parts of India.
Since this was an introductory conference and mostly all the delegates were newbies to Agile, the contents of the conference were mostly abstract. The conference started off with Dr. Kamat welcoming the delegates, followed by a short introduction to ASCI and an overview of Agile by Naresh Jain. This talk/discussion was followed by a talk on how to migrate to Agile by Anand Joglekar. Since the first 2 talks were quite abstract, most of the delegates were mapping Agile to their process and taking it as it was coming.
Following these 2 talks was a coffee break. After the break was the all time favorite activity – XP Planning Game. This was the real ice_breaker. Since there were around 55 delegates, they were divided into 5 teams of 11 each. Santosh Reddy, Deepti Sachdev, Bhavin Javia, Anand and Naresh were the coaches for each team. It‘s unbelievable the amount of energy and enthusiasm an activity like XP Game can generate. One of the delegates made a comment saying that, “The way we are developing software is so non_intuitive way of planning and execution“. The delegates thoroughly enjoyed the XP game and they had concrete lessons to take back from this activity.
The XP game was followed by lunch, where a lot of people tried to share their experiences developing software. Wish someone could record some of these great interactions.
Post lunch Ajay Danait spoke about how agile developers create their own identity. The talk spoke about what a developer‘s life would be like, on an agile project. Ajay also spoke about different types of developers and how agile tends to work best in flat hierarchical organizations.
Henry Jacob presented his Art of designing: The i4 approach. The talk emphasized on Software solutioning rather than just software engineering. The presentation spoke about the importance of Innovation, Interaction, Information and Intelligence [i4] in software engineering. The important thing to consider is the client focus of the i4 approach.
The last presentation for the day was the “Even More Agile“ presentation by Chris Stevenson and Deven Tolia. This was a case-study of how a particular project at ThoughtWorks India is refactoring its process to successfully deliver to the customer and solve various other issues that the project was facing. The presentation had some great pictures which helped the audience to visualize the process of becoming more agile.
Dr. Kamat officially marked the end of the conference with this thanks giving note. Naresh presented a small memento to Dr. Kamat on behalf of ASCI for organizing the wonderful conference.
After the valedictory program, Naresh, Conon and Chris gave a small introduction to Continuous integration using Cruise Control, refactoring using Eclipse, functional testing using FIT, etc. In the mean time, Ajay facilitated a BOF on “How to go Agile?” The demos went on till 7:30 PM before the facilitators were dragged down the stage kicking and screaming.
