Today, in India, I believe we have many Agile coaches (internal and external, more internal coaches). If you are helping bring Agile/Lean/Light-Weight thinking into your company, you are playing the Agile coach role (you like it or not). You could be in the leadership role doing this or you could have taken the ownership and facilitating/influencing your team. While doing so, we all need a lot of help, advice and reassurance of our strategies. To facilitate this, help people network and to push the boundaries of Agile, in 2008, Deb and I created the first Agile Coach Camp in US.
In the past I’ve considered doing something similar in India, but always felt we’ve not reached the point yet. Now (esp. after the agile india 2010 conference), I feel we might be at this point.
So if you are interested in participating in a 2 day invitation only, all open-space based conference, over a weekend in March/April, inform me by filling out the following form:
Also please vote for which city you would like to have the conference in:
A lot of people think, if they can write some code, they qualify as a software developer.
IMHO don’t call yourself a developer if you don’t take ownership and responsibility for solving the overall, real business/user problem.
A good developer
understands the overall problem and its context.
has good problem solving skills (we are in the business of creative problem solving)
has empathy for the users and is a user and business advocate.
takes ownership by being a part-of the team and having a sense of belonging.
makes investment into continuous learning & improvement
[Agile and Software Craftsmanship movements has made great strives in this direction. However some Agile folks don't get it. We can't draw a line and say this side is business and that side is development. Its ONE team working towards a common goal. Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of teams who end up creating artificial boundaries between people wanting the software and people building it.]
Anyway, having the ability to just writing some code does not qualify you to be a developer.
Recently at the Agile Mumbai 2010 and Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference, we tried to make the conference as green (environment friendly) as possible. Following are the things we tried:
We did not hand over any conference program, printed hand-outs & slides or any other printed material (except for what the conference sponsor handed over). All this info is already available on our website. To make it convenient for the conference attendees, we took 3 large (A2 size) printout and stuck it outside each hall (track).
We also skipped handing over notepads & pens. I my experience very few people use them. Also those who want to use it, it’s easy to carry a notepad and pen.
Lunch and snacks were served in washable plates & steel spoons. Usually conferences use throw-away plates and plastic spoons.
For drinking tea, coffee & juice, we requested the conference participants to carry their own mugs & water bottles. This did not work all that well. We had only 3 people carry their own mug. In future, we plan to hand out a mug to each participant. (For Bengaluru conference, since it was in a hotel, they took care of serving tea & coffee in porcelain cups. Water was served is proper washable glasses)
Conserving Electricity: We tried to switch off projectors and Air Conditioners when ever possible. This is an area of huge improvement. We need to find more interesting ways to conserve energy.
Originally we had planned to request the participants to return their lanyards so we could reuse it. This one fell through the cracks.
At both the conferences we had an enlightening talk from Captain Planet (aka Saurabh Arora) showing the effect of global warming and how we can take small steps everyday to avoid further worsening the situation.
Overall I think there are lot more things we can do to make the conference more environmental friendly.
Developing nations, which are trying to establish themselves as a IT Destination have to fight against the giants in the out-sourcing world. For many years companies used CMM as a way to get some attention. But CMM is
heavy weight,
expensive to get assessed
does not really fit small companies’ (20-50 people’s) needs.
Also in the last few years CMM has got a pretty bad reputation and hence its not necessarily a great marketing advantage.
Considering all this, what do companies do? What is the new shinny thing they should all run after. ..ta..da… Agile & Lean.
More suitable for their needs,
Some Customers are asking for it
Is also trendy and gives the marketing advantage over the big outsourcing companies.
The conference theme this year is “Post-Modern Agile - Be done with the Dogma“. The conference is really targeted at Agile practitioners, who want to explore ideas beyond the basic Agile stuff.
Also this year, for the first time, we are hosting the World-famous Programming with the Stars contest during the conference.
The conference theme this year is “Post-Modern Agile - Be done with the Dogma“. The conference is really targeted at Agile practitioners, who want to explore ideas beyond the basic Agile stuff.
Also this year, for the first time, we are hosting the World-famous Programming with the Stars contest during the conference.
Also for those who cannot attend the Mumbai conference, don’t worry. We have another conference coming up in Bengaluru. Check out: Agile Bengaluru 2010 Conference.
