Agile gave us a wonderful head-start in a different direction than the one we’ve used to (heavy weight methods.) Personally I feel we’ve got as much value we could. Now its time to start thinking from a different direction, building on what we already know and to some extent unlearning some things we know.

Wait a second, isn’t Agile all about “Inspect and Adapt”?

There is a limit to “inspect and adapt”. If you look at the Lean movement, most people talk about Kaizen (small gradual change, change for the good, which is in-line with inspect-and-adapt). But very few people talk about Kaikaku (disruptive change or transformation).

Remember Agile was Kaikaku for most of us in late 90s. And then we’ve applied Kaizen to it for many years. IMHO now its time to apply Kaikaku again.

For the last 6+ years, few of us in India, are trying to establish a sustainable Agile community. The truth is that we are still struggling to have a self-sufficient, self-driven community.

We don’t seem to be hosting regular user group meetings. Our sporadic events seem to attract mostly new people each time. Next meeting we rarely see them. Huge number of people sign up, but only a fraction show up.

Its not just the Agile community, we’ve tried many other communities like .Net User Group, TechCamp, GeekNight, BarCamps, etc. Except the Linux community (FOSS now) I don’t think any other software community has really sustained itself.

This is very contrary to what I saw when I used to facilitate the Agile Philly User Group and the Philly GeekNight. People used to drive 2 hrs to attend the meeting. We had the same set of people coming every meeting. We all had this sense of learning and growing together.

What do you think is different in India?

IMHO the biggest problem I see is that there is so much “mediocre job opportunity” available, that frankly software professionals can be in demand for many years without learn anything new. With many people I sense a ”there-is-no-need-to-stretch-ourself” attitude. Necessity is the mother of innovation and action. People don’t see the necessity. Period.

There are very few people I know who care about learning and exploring and growing.

Some other problems I see:

• For most people, there is no end to mediocre opportunities and they are happy with it. “This job sucks, but its OK, I get a decent salary.” kind of attitude. The ones who want to purse big dreams mostly move to US or other places. (There are always exceptions to the rule.)
• With all the personal, social life & society obligations and working late to catch up with counterparts in other countries, there is very little time left for user groups and other initiatives. Even if one is interested, the traffic and other logistics make it next to impossible to motivate people.
• There is country culture, but the biggest culprit is the Organization culture. At certain places I’ve worked, if you are not learning new stuff, you feel like a piece of shit. But in many other companies I’ve visited, that’s not the case.
• Indian Software Industry is unfortunately very “brand conscious“. If its a big name speaking at an event, people will walk a whole day to attend the event. But if its a local speaker presenting, it doesn’t appeal.

I’m sorry if you find me ranting, but I’m disappointed with the attitude. I’ve almost lost hope, but may be you can show me the light.

My friend Srihari has been working on a great project called Systems We Make. His goal is to provide a consolidated catalog of various papers/articles about building large, complex, distributed system.

He personally searches, reads through and filters each the papers for you. This is awesome!

Please support his initiative.

Simple Design and Testing Conference is an all open space conference providing software practitioners a platform to meet face-to-face and discuss/demonstrate simple design & testing principles/approaches.

At this conference you’ll meet real, hands-on practitioners interested in peer-to-peer learning and exploration. We strive hard to avoid fluffy, marketing talks and other non-sense.

• What: Open Space Conference on Simple Design & Testing practices
• Where: Skills Matter eXchange, London, UK
• When: 12th-13th Mar 2011
• Who: Software Practitioners (Developers, Testers, UX Designer…)
• Cost: £50.00, also (Position Paper required!)

SDT Conf 2011 is our 6th annual conference and for the first time in Europe. Check out the past conference SDT Conf 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 details.

Register now…

Have an idea? Want to challenge some Agile practices? Like to share your experience?

Lightning talks, is your opportunity to share your ideas or experiences in less than 10 minute.

Send your talk proposal to lightningchair@xp2011.org before Jan 7th 2011.

More about the conference: http://xp2011.org/

I’m proud to announce the 5th Annual SDTConf. This year we plan to hold the conference in Otterbein University Campus Center, OH, USA.

We plan to keep a max cap of 100 participants for this conference.

As you might be aware SDTConf is a free conference and we use the concept of position papers as the price for admission. This helps us ensure the quality of the participants is really high. You can add your position papers for the conference on our wiki. Making the position papers public helps other participants gauge in advance what they can expect from the conference.

Last but not the least, since this is a community run, non-profit event, we really on sponsorship in kind to make this event possible. Here is a list of items that you or your company can sponsor to support this conference.

P.S: Please blog about this conference and/or send an email to your friends and colleagues. Word of mouth is the only way we market this event.

How do you know you are ready to start iterating? In some cases, very little is needed before the first iteration. In other cases, rushing to iterate (because you were told to) can lead to weeks of time wasted overly focused on delivering a poorly understood product.

In this presentation by David Hussman titled Getting Ready to Produce at Agile Mumbai 2010 Conference, David provides concrete tools for discovering your product context and assessing whether you are ready to start building and / or iterating. Participants learned tools for defining how much process you need and tools for truly understanding what you are building and why, as well as who will use it, why they will (or will not) use it and why.

10 years after the introduction of agile methods, many communities are succeeding in their adoption while others are struggling or failing. Why? Many struggle because agile methods were introduced in an overly prescriptive manner. People were told to follow a set of practices instead of learning to use the agile practices and values to amplify their existing strengths and address their challenges.

In this talk, David Hussman shares successful coaching techniques he uses to grow sustainable agility that lasts beyond the early iterations or the first few agile projects. David begins with a series of tools to help you build a solid foundation: assessments, pragmatic practice selection, chartering and product planning tools. He then moves on to discuss ideas for finding a groove of discover and delivery that is best suited to your project community.

As a full time working coach, David uses coaching stories and experiences to discuss establishing strong cadence while also building the essence of coaching and coaches in your community Whether you are new to agile methods or you are a seasoned players, this session will help you grow your coaching skills and your ability to truly discover and deliver real value.