At the Agile Mumbai 2010, Mahesh Baxi takes you through an exciting journey of key lessons learned from one of the largest agile projects executed at ThoughtWorks which will cover:

• Key agile principles
• What challenges comes along with the scale of up to 200+ people with added complexity of distributed location
• How is it different from other agile projects in terms of planning ahead, release plans, scope management, infrastructure
• Communication – The most important ingredient for large scale agile projects to be successful
• What kind of team structure would work best?
• How to stay focused? How to identify bottlenecks and work through them

At the Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference, Jann Thomas discusses and identifies ways in which agile enablers can facilitate the transition to Agile practices. She covered basic Agile practices as well as techniques for introducing them to the software delivery team. She also presents common software delivery problems and the Agile path to solutions.

During the Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference, J.B. Rainsberge, in his Keynote highlights the top 10 things he wished people would stop doing on Software Projects.

J B Rainsberger & Naresh Jain share their experience on coaching agile teams. They present:

1. How to apply Theory of Constraint [ToC] to identify the bottlenecks or issues the teams are facing during their agile adoption?
2. Once we identify the bottleneck, how we delivered knowledge and experience to the teams, just in time to apply that knowledge to eliminate the bottleneck, using the Just-In-Time practice concept?

This 90 mins workshop was presented at the Agile Mumbai 2010 and Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference.

David Hussman’s Keynote at Agile Bengaluru 2010 Conference titled: “Discovery and Delivery – Redesigning Agility”

David starts off saying “Agile communities know that the sooner they deliver a working product the sooner they can determine the value it provides. Yet while the ability to deliver frequently is valuable, if you don’t know where you are going, it is easy to iteratively not get there.”

In this talk David RI-examines the balance of discovery and delivery techniques in use by agile communities today. He specifically, discusses how can design thinking help agile communities discover deeper product value before iterative delivery begins. Also, after the first iteration, how can agile communities use design tools to keep the users alive and well and part of every story, acceptance tests, and iteration of development and delivery.

Jeff Patton’s Keynote at Agile Mumbai 2010 Conference titled: “Outside the Code – Using Agile Ideas to Drive Product Success“. This short talk focuses on the techniques we use outside the software to collaborate and plan with our customers and users. You’ll learn about concepts and techniques for effectively talking about and representing your product ideas, for understanding the people who use your software, and how to leverage iterative and incremental development to learn faster and reduce risk.

At the end of the Programming With the Stars @ the Agile Mumbai 2010 conference, based on public demand, J. B. Rainsberger and yours truly did a 6 min public demo of Pair Programming. We started with an Ugly Pairing session, trying to show-case some pairing anti-patterns.

Followed by a normal pairing session:

Enjoii madi…

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.