At this point, 400 delegates have registered for Agile India 2013 Conference in less than 3 weeks.

Looking at the delegates who’ve registered so far, we have represenation from the following companies:

• Aconex
• Alcatel Lucent
• Alliance Global Services
• Allscripts India Pvt. Ltd
• Aricent Technologies
• BNP Paribas India Solutions
• Cognizant Technology Solutions
• Direction Software Solution
• eGain Communications
• Enteleki Technology Solutions
• Envestnet, India
• GembaTech
• HCL
• HCL Technologies
• Huawei Technologies
• Independent Consultant
• InMobi
• InRhythm
• Inteamo
• Intergraph Consulting Pvt. Ltd.
• John Deere India Private Limited
• MSCI
• Multunus Software
• Ostrya Labs
• Pitney Bowes Software
• Rotary International Infotech Pvt. Ltd.
• S.i. Systems
• SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd.
• Shop Smart Inc/BradsDeals.com
• Societe Generale
• Software Artisan
• Support.com
• SymphonyTeleca Corporation
• Synerzip Softech India Pvt. Ltd.
• Tata Consultancy Services
• TenXperts Technologies
• Thomson Reuters
• ThoughtWorks Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.
• Yahoo India Pvt Ltd

And their roles:

• Agile and Lean Coach
• Agile Coach
• Agile Coach/Scrum Master
• Agile Project Manager
• Architect
• CEO
• Co-Founder and CEO
• Code Junkie
• Code Monkey
• Consultant
• Development Manager
• Director
• Director-Quality
• Engineer 2
• Engineering – Director
• Engineering Lead
• Engineering Manager
• EVP & CTO
• Executive Manager
• General Manager
• General Manager – Quality
• Head of Engineering
• Head of Project Management
• Lead Executive Quality
• Manager
• Product Owner
• Product Owner/Technical Lead
• Program Manager
• Project Manager
• Senior Consultant
• Senior Manager
• Senior Manager – Consulting
• Senior Manager-Technical Group head
• Senior Manager, Agile Coach
• Senior Project Manager
• Senior Software Engineer
• Software Architect
• Software Artisan
• Software Developer (Embedded System)
• Sr. Associate
• Sr Engineer
• Sr. Manager
• Sr. Manager – Projects
• Sr. Project Manager
• Sr. Quality Manager
• Sr. Software Engineer1
• Sr. Vice President
• Team Lead
• Technologist
• VP Solutions

In my experience, people/companies would like to register for the conference early-on, to take advantage of the early-bird discounts. However they might not be sure who (which employee) will be available and can attend the conference. So most end up waiting till the end to book their seats.

This feels broken! It’s not good for the participants nor for the conference organizers.

To avoid this problem, we’ve introduced a new feature in the Agile India 2013 Registration System, which lets you register for the conference by just specifying the number of seats. You can defer adding the exact attendees’ details till 1 month before the conference.

Also you can always edit the attendees info, up-till 1 month before the conference.

(We need 1 month’s lead time to get the conference t-shirts, badges and other logistics in place.)

Recently I facilitated a workshop at the Agile Goa 2012 Conference titled – “Agile Way of Dealing with Uncertainty in a Complex Adaptive World“.

Abstract: It is human nature to look for patterns while solving new problems. We have a dangerous tendency to reuse what we already know to solve the next problem. We rarely discard what we’ve learned; we simply build on top of it. Sometimes this is a useful tactic, but often new problems and their context are slightly (if not vastly) different than the previous ones. And applying our previous way of doing things, will not be best suited for tackling the new problem.

In the software world, we’ve seen a similar desire to find the “one true way”, “the BEST method”, “the silver bullet” to solve all software development problems. Alas, after decades of trying we’ve not found one.

In this workshop, I’ll let you discover why this is not possible and possibly explain how best to deal with this problem. This ideas in this workshop are based on my experience backed by latest research from Cognitive Science, Complex Adaptive System’s Theory and Evolutionary Psychology.

Slides:

We’ve been working with our event management partner to figure out the conference layout for the Agile India 2013 Conference. As you might know, we are hosting the conference at Sheraton Hotel. Following is the layout we’ve come up with:

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.

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.