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

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.

Update: Stage Proposals are closed.

Sessions proposals are open now; visit: http://submit2012india.agilealliance.org/proposals

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.

A prioritized user story backlog helps to understand what to do next, but is a difficult tool for understanding what your whole system is intended to do. A user story map arranges user stories into a useful model to help understand the functionality of the system, identify holes and omissions in your backlog, and effectively plan holistic releases that delivery value to users and business with each release.

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.