At the last Agile Coach Camp I gave a lightening talk on “Process OVER People”. In this talk I requested all the coaches present at the conference to really think about their advice to companies. Are we trying to put a process boundary and become Process police? Is this coaching? A lot of coaches I meet, recommend “First do it by the Book, then deviate”. What does “First Do it by the Book” mean? I appreciate the book and I think there is a wealth of knowledge out there. But we should remember the book was written with some context in mind and at some point in time. One cannot blindly take what is in the book and try to apply it. That really feels like “Process OVER People” to me. You need to take your team into account. You need to consider what you are trying to build and most importantly you need to prioritize what needs to be fixed on your team or in your organization before trying to go and “Do it by the Book”.

Over the last couple of years I really feel Agile is gone into a mass-production mode and we’ve stopped innovating. Every company wants to be Agile. This has lead to a huge demand for Agile Coaches. And because of this you find all kind of people claiming to be Agile coaches. What surprises me is a lot of these folks have themselves never really worked on an Agile project. Forget Agile project, a lot them don’t really have a successful project delivery story to share. How can one preach something and do something else (or do nothing)? My belief is that one needs to lead by example and not my blabbering crap.

I asked the participants at the conference to tell me what new tricks, techniques, tips, practices, etc they have learnt in the last one or two. Very few people (may be 2 out of 50) had something to share. Are we getting so busy mass producing what onces worked that we have forgot to go back into the trenches and try new things? My fear is that if we continue this way, Agile will soon be the next CMM (at least the bad implementations of it, which is most common).

If you are interested in some background about where I’m coming from, you can read my position paper for the Agile Coach Camp.

After a 4 hr delay in my flights I finally made it to Ireland. But the airline lost my bags on the way. Looks like my bad luck is only bad! (This is a typical thing you would hear an Indian say when things go wrong.)

Well on the bright side, I got to walk for 2 miles at mid-night to go shopping to a 24 store here in Limerick called Dunnes Stores. I had absolutely no clothes left to wear today. To my surprise there was a father’s day sale running at the store. So I got a bunch of clothes quite cheap, about 40 EURO in all. Also I found really nice and friendly people in the city. I lost my way a couple of time and folks were generous enough to show me the correct way. One gentleman even gave me a drop in his car when I was way off the road I had to go.

Thanks to Agile Alliance for sponsoring my trip. I’m using my Gordon Pask award to cover the expenses for this conference. The award comes with a “travel to two conferences in two other continents” and all expenses paid by Agile Alliance. This is the first out of the 2, I’m using. I’m hoping that there is a conference in Australia or South Africa that I can use this award to go to.

This afternoon I’m running a workshop on Acceptance Test Driven Development. I was told that there are 16 people who have registered (paid) to attend this workshop. I’m really looking forward to meet those folks and to attend the rest of the conference.

This is my first time in Ireland and I must tell you, this place is awesome. Its really beautiful. Weather is great. Well I’m going out to enjoy my time. Will be back in Mumbai in a week’s time (hopefully, pray for me).

Wow! What a great conference. The first Agile Coach Camp is now officially over. We had over 70 participants. The diversity of the participants was really amazing. Check out the Diversity Stats here.

Its a great sense of accomplishment and is always refreshing to organizer a conference where the participants go back very satisfied. I feel all those sleepless nights are worth it. Big thanks to all the sponsors and volunteers who made it possible. And a big big thanks to Deborah Hartmann, co-organizer of the conference. Without her, I don’t think I would have been able to put together such a wonderful conference. Thanks Deb, I learnt a lot from you.

Conference Highlights:

• Lightening talks was a big hit.
• Participants like the Position Paper concept
• Open spaces worked well. Big Thanks to John Engle for helping facilitate the Open Space.
• Complete list of Open Space sessions : http://wiki.agilecoachcamp.org/tiki-index.php?page=Sessions2008
• Conference Retrospective Notes

So, if you would like to organize Agile Coach Camp in your area, please get in touch with me or Deb and we’ll be more than happy to help you do so.

Directi has launched its first Treasure Hunt http://th.directi.com/. The target audience for this treasure hunt are the participants of the Great Indian Developer Summit. Hopefully we will come up with many more such contests to help us build a stronger community of software professionals in India.

On similar lines we are planning a series of contests focused on Software Design, UX, Testing, etc.  Watch out the Directi wiki for updates.

I just got back from Chandigarh after participating in the Agile Chandigarh 2008 workshop.

Vikram Dhiman did a great job of organizing the workshop. I really appreciate his initiative.

We had over 35 participants from 11 different companies. I was surprised by the level of Agile knowledge the participants had.
I ran the Waterfall to Agile demo followed by Agile Overview presentation. After this, Vikram gave a great presentation on Agile Myths. The last presentation of the day was from Rajesh. Rajesh spoke about the role of a manager. Rajesh was just introduced to Agile by Vikram a couple of weeks back. Rajesh has been doing Management consulting for the last 15+ year and he was happy to see that Agile is embracing what he calls “Common Sense” management.

Vikram will upload all the slides soon.

Thanks to all the participants and organizers. I wish more people take up initiatives like this, so that we can spread the agile awareness faster and move up the value chain.

During the IV Agile Ukraine Gathering, I gave a quick talk on Distributed Agile. The presentation is based on my learning from the last 5 years. Most of my experience is derived by working on Distributed Projects at ThoughtWorks and the credit should go to ThoughtWorks.

http://www.slideshare.net/nashjain/distributed-agile/ 

Also you can see the other slides from the conference here: http://www.slideshare.net/krivitsky/slideshows

Currently I’m suffering from massively over-committing to conferences, community building activities and open source. With one conference every month and commitment on few open source projects, I’m finding it really hard to fulfill my full time job @ Directi. After thinking about this for a couple of weeks, I have decided the following:

• No more conferences for Naresh Jain in 2009 and possible 2010. I might attend may be one conference just to stay in touch with folks. I need to focus on working in the trenches and continue learning and innovating. Right now I feel I’m getting quite hands-off.
• I’m taking a temporary part-time break from Directi for the next 4-5 months. I’ll still continue to be an employee of Directi and I’ll also spend 1.5 to 2 weeks a month working within Directi. But my involvement on their products will be drastically reduced from leading some aspects of the project to consulting on them until these 4-5 months.
• For the next 4-5 months to sustain myself I’ll be open to consulting/training for 3-5 days a month. Hopefully this can fund me for the series of conferences that I’ve signed up for this year.
• In 2008, I’m already over booked, so starting now, I’m refusing all new offers to speaker at conferences.
• Over time, I’ll reduce my commitment on ASCI activities. I’ll try to keep my involvement to a minimum, mostly a coordinator/contact point for some activities.
• I’ll continue contributing to all the open source projects that I’m involved with, but over a period of time I might reduce the number of projects I’m involved with.
• I’ll continue to play customer role for the Penn State project, but hopefully I’ll be done with it in May.

If you have any suggestions or ideas to help me, please feel free to guide this blind man

As you might already know, Microsoft has agreed to host the next Simple Design and Testing Conference on Sep 12 - 14th 2008. Big thanks to Jim Newkirk, who has been the driving force on Microsoft’s side and is helping us organize this conference.

The venue for the conference is:

Microsoft Midwest
3025 Highland Pkwy., Suite 300
Downers Grove, IL 60515
Phone: (630) 725-4000
Fax: (630) 495-7764

For this year’s conference we are using the “Position Paper” approach, like last year. If you want to participate in this conference, please update your position paper on our wiki right now.

Also note that we need your help to make this event possible. Please have a look at the list of items that we need organizations/individuals to sponsor.

I’ll be presenting two tutorials at the XP 2008 conference : http://www.lero.ie/xp2008/tutorials.html

• Acceptance Test Driven Development
• Refactoring Fest

Agile Mumbai 2008 conference will be hosted by Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management & Engineering, Mumbai on the 28th and 29th March 200. For this conference we have decided to have only tutorials and workshops. There is a growing feeling that plain talks at conferences are not very effective. So we want to increase the participants experience at the conference by hand picking really good speakers who have excellent material to deliver.

Based on what has happened so far, I’m convinced that this will be a very successful conference. We have 5 international speakers and 7 national speakers. We have over 2 weeks to go and already we have 183 people who have registered on the website. Even though we can accommodate more people, we have decided to cap the conference at 150 participants. So if you want to make sure you get a seat at the conference, please block your seat by send in your registration fee in advance. More details : http://agileindia.org/registration?event_id=17