Professionals with 160 unique Roles from 144 different Companies worldwide have registered so far.

Following is the profile of the registered participants:

Learn… Network… Explore…

@ Asia’s Premier Agile and Lean Conference

A refreshing yet intense 3-day conference where you can:

• Learn from over 135 expert practitioners and 120 hand-picked sessions.
• Network & share your knowledge and experience with over 700 eager international delegates from literally every software company practicing or exploring Agile & Lean.
• Explore diverse and interesting solutions and contribute to the future of Agile software development.

AGILE INDIA 2012 (http://agile2012.in/)
17, 18 & 19 February 2012
Le Meridien, Bengaluru.

REGISTER:  http://agile2012.in/registration (register before 12 Jan & save Rs. 1000)

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LEARN

Over 120 hand picked sessions by expert practitioners on Agile, Lean and Lean-Startup covering:

• Agile Development Practices
• Enterprise Agile
• Leadership and Organizational Transformation
• Agile & Outsourcing
• DevOps
• Culture, People & Teams
• Lean Principles & Practices
• Agile Product Management
• Coaching & Mentoring and
• Lean Startups.

Catch up on the latest Research on Agile and Lean practices presented by top international researchers.

Also get a unique opportunity to interact with our 10 specially invited Thought Leaders from our Industry.

Check out the full conference program.
Don’t forget to see the detailed stats about the program.

NETWORK

• Interact with 135 expert practitioners & speakers from 18 Countries.
• Meet all the thought leaders, who put together this wonderful 3-day program (over the last 6 months).
• Exchange ideas with 700 international delegates from literally every successful software company practicing Agile & Lean.

See profile of registered participants.

EXPLORE

Come explore the diverse, interesting solutions Agile & Lean practitioners have discovered to make software development enjoyable. Discover a gamut of problems and solutions practitioners are tackling with their agile adoption.

In the last 10 years, Agile & Lean has fundamentally changed the way successful software companies built software solutions. We’ve solved many core problems, but there are more, interesting problems that need to be solved. Share your thoughts and explore the future of software development.

Participate in an exclusive Open Space, which is part of the Research Cafe.

SPONSOR

Showcase your brand to Asia’s largest Agile and Lean software development conferences delegates. Sponsorship details: http://agile2012.in/sponsors/

Come, be part of the new generation of Agile & Lean Thought Leaders.

SPREAD THE WORD!

Blog: http://blog.agile2012.in/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/agileindia
Twitter: #AgileIndai2012

Promote the Agile India 2012 Conference, by showing off these badges on your websites/blogs/etc.

I’m extremely happy to announce the Agile India 2012 Conference Program.

We’ll be hosting total of 12 Stages, 120 Sessions, 125 Speakers from 18 Countries. Detailed stats below:

With a wide variety of session types:

63% of session targeted at practitioners:

Large number of 60 and 90 mins sessions:

We’ve 120 speakers selected through the submissions system and 5+ invited speakers:

We had an extremely good team of 111 program committee members from 21 Countries who reviewed all the submission and selected the conference program:

Did you know how truly diverse the Agile India 2012 conference program committee is?

That’s right! We have over 100 members from 21 countries.

Folks, Agile India 2012 conference is live! What does that mean?

Early-bird registration has started in full swing.

Sponsorship detail are published for interested companies.

We are reviewing all the awesome proposals submitted by experts from around the world. We should have the program live by end of Nov.

Over the last 7 years, with the help of various passionate folks, I’ve organized 50+ conferences. (Agile India Conferences, Simple Design and Testing Conference, Agile Coach Camp and CodeChef TechTalks to name a few.)

Most of these conferences were small to medium scale conferences in the range of  50 to 375 delegates.

Why we never organized larger conferences? Was it because we were not capable of organizing them? Or was there something stopping us from doing so?

Personally I prefer organizing small scale conference over large scale conference for the following reasons:

• In my experience the quality of interaction and experience speakers & participants have is inversely proportional to the size of the conference.
• Cost to run the conference exponentially increases with size. As the size increases:
• we need a bigger venue, which does impose a significant cost.
• overall logistics becomes lot more complex. Need extra planning and coordination. Again increasing cost and making the overall plan less adaptive.
• the participant price has to be increased – which means, most participants won’t be able to self fund their registration. They’ll depend on their companies to sponsor them. This leads to many people who actually do get sponsored by their companies are the ones less inclined to learn at the conference. Which again impacts the overall quality experience of others participants.
• we become more dependent on the sponsors. The more we are dependent on sponsors, more their demands. Inevitably leading to compromising the conference. Sometimes sponsors want speaker slots (esp. keynotes) for sponsorship. Also they further complicate the logistics.
• Are less inclusive from smaller companies and individual’s point of view. Cost is one aspect, but also because there would be a larger number of participants from big companies, the interactions at the conference take a very different dynamics.
• Right from the beginning, large conference have a fear of not attracting enough delegate and sponsors. To mitigate that risk, most large conference programs are filled with Big names. Who mostly present the same old topics which have been beaten to death over a decade. We like it or not, the overall program tends to be more focused on basics (least common denominator) and seems to attract mostly beginners who are willing to pay that kind of money. Innovative and disruptive ideas are mostly neglected. Because they would really be disruptive for the audience.
• Because of the previous point, the real practitioners, doing really meaningful work, tend to shy away from such conferences. Again leading to poorer quality conference.
• Marketing and Branding effort: Large conferences need huge effort and funds to market and brand themselves. Smaller conferences are mostly marketing and branded through word of mouth and these days with social media.
• The effort and time it takes to organize one large, centrally located conference, in that much time, we could easily organizer 3-4 smaller, more local conferences. Smaller conferences surely reduce the costs for participants. Smaller conferences encourages more of a distributed, sustainable, local community.

I could spend rest of my sunday afternoon thinking about this and I’m sure I’ll come up with 10 more points against large conference. Having said that, large conference do have some clear advantages that smaller conference cannot achieve. the splash, the penetration, cross pollination, etc. etc.

However I think its clear, at least to me, why I prefer smaller conference.

It cool to have thought thru the issues and to have the points flushed out. But to avoid dogmatism, its always important to reevaluate your points every few years. Which is one of the reasons, I decided to help organize Agile India 2012 Conference.

As you might be aware the JIT Submissions are closed. We are very happy with the response we’ve got so far.

Totally we’ve received 231 submissions.

Following is the stage wise breakup of the proposals:

Following is the breakup according to the levels (very happy to see a large number of sessions in the practicing space):

Following is the breakup according to the session types: (again not surprised to see a large number of talks):

Lastly, the duration wise breakup of the sessions:

Also we’ve received 22 research papers from the following countries.
Selected papers will be published by IEEE Publications.

Also, we are happy to have totally 184 unique presenters (159 primary presenters and 38 secondary presenters.)

Currently we are reviewing all these proposals. You should see the final list by end of November.

Many product companies struggle with a big challenge: how to identify a Minimal Viable Product that will let them quickly validate their product hypothesis?

Teams that share the product vision and agree on priorities for features are able to move faster and more effectively.

During this tutorial, we’ll take a hypothetical product and coach you on how to effectively come up with an evolutionary roadmap for your product.

This 180 mins tutorial teaches you how to collaborate on the vision of the product and create a Product Backlog, a User Story map and a pragmatic Release Plan.

Detailed Activity Breakup

1. PART 1: UNDERSTAND PRODUCT CONTEXT
• Introduction
• Define Product Vision
• Identify Users That Matter
• Create User Personas
• Define User Goals
• A Day-In-Life Of Each Persona
2. PART 2: BUILD INITIAL STORY MAP FROM ACTIVITY MODEL
• Prioritize Personas
• Break Down Activities And Tasks From User Goals
• Lay Out Goals Activities And Tasks
• Walk Through And Refine Activity Model
3. PART 3: CREATE FIRST-CUT PRODUCT ROAD MAP
• Prioritize High Level Tasks
• Define Themes
• Refine Tasks
• Define Minimum Viable Product
• Identify Internal And External Release Milestones
4. PART 4: WRITE USER STORIES FOR THE FIRST RELEASE
• Define User Task Level Acceptance Criteria
• Break Down User Tasks To User Stories Based On Acceptance Criteria
• Refine Acceptance Criteria For Each Story
• Find Ways To Further Thin-Slice User Stories
• Capture Assumptions And Non-Functional Requirements
5. PART 5: REFINE FIRST INTERNAL RELEASE BASED ON ESTIMATES
• Define Relative Size Of User Stories
• Refine Internal Release Milestones For First-Release Based On Estimates
• Define Goals For Each Release
• Refine Product And Project Risks
• Present And Commit To The Plan
6. PART 6: RETROSPECTIVE
• Each part will take roughly 30 mins.

I’ve facilitated this workshop for many organizations (small-startups to large enterprises.)

More details: Product Discovery Workshop from Industrial Logic

Techniques

Focused Break-Out Sessions, Group Activities, Interactive Dialogues, Presentations, Heated Debates/Discussions and Some Fun Games

Target Audience

• Product Owner
• Release/Project Manager
• Subject Matter Expert, Domain Expert, or Business Analyst
• User Experience team
• Architect/Tech Lead
• Core Development Team (including developers, testers, DBAs, etc.)

This tutorial can take max 30 people. (3 teams of 10 people each.)

Workshop Prerequisites

Required: working knowledge of Agile (iterative and incremental software delivery models) Required: working knowledge of personas, users stories, backlogs, acceptance criteria, etc.

Testimonials

“I come away from this workshop having learned a great deal about the process and equally about many strategies and nuances of facilitating it. Invaluable!

Naresh Jain clearly has extensive experience with the Product Discovery Workshop. He conveyed the principles and practices underlying the process very well, with examples from past experience and application to the actual project addressed in the workshop. His ability to quickly relate to the project and team members, and to focus on the specific details for the decomposition of this project at the various levels (goals/roles, activities, tasks), is remarkable and a good example for those learning to facilitate the workshop.

Key take-aways for me include the technique of acceptance criteria driven decomposition, and the point that it is useful to map existing software to provide a baseline framework for future additions.”

Doug Brophy, Agile Expert, GE Energy

Learning outcomes

• Understand the thought process and steps involved during a typical product discovery and release planning session
• Using various User-Centered Design techniques, learn how to create a User Story Map to help you visualize your product
• Understand various prioritization techniques that work at the Business-Goal and User-Persona Level
• Learn how to decompose User Activities into User Tasks and then into User Stories
• Apply an Acceptance Criteria-Driven Discovery approach to flush out thin slices of functionality that cut across the system
• Identify various techniques to narrow the scope of your releases, without reducing the value delivered to the users
• Improve confidence and collaboration between the business and engineering teams
• Practice key techniques to work in short cycles to get rapid feedback and reduce risk

Gentle reminder, the early bird submission for the Agile India 2012 Conference closes on 26th Sep 2011.

Visit our submission system to get started.

Some resources to help you with your submission:

• How to Submit a Proposal?
• Everything You Should Know about Submitting a World-Class Proposal
• Early Bird Submission: What’s the big rush?
• Overview of the Review Process
• Important Milestones
• Compensation for speakers