The final day

Agile2010 seems like a long time ago, and a long way away now that I am sitting back at my desk in Blighty. But for the purposes of completeness, I thought I should blog about the final day of the conference.

First things first - there were no pancakes for breakfast. I won't pretend that I wasn't disappointed.

The final day was a half day, made up of 3 talks. The first was by Dave West from Forrester; the second by Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson and the third - the final keynote - by Mike Cohn.

Dave West spoke about how IT organizations are effectively using Agile + product orientation to deliver long term value. Quoteable quotes "The main difference between a terrorist and a methodologist is that you can reason with a terrorist."

2 key points that Dave raised were:

• He reiterated the fact that UX should form part of the development team, it should not sit separately. This was the sentiment shared by a number of the speakers and conference attendees at Agile2010.
• Software developers should keep in mind that they are delivering an experience to the customer, not a series of screens.

Ron and Chet performed a great double act, again reiterating a number of things that we had already heard throughout the conference:

• Keep things simple. They later went on to say: "Doing it better is not harder, it is easier. Do it better."
• If scrum isn't working, there are probably deeper problems in the organisation.
• You can't become good at anything just by having a certification. The certification is only the start.

The final session of the morning was Mike Cohn's "ADAPTing to Agile for Continued Success".  The focus of Mike's talk was contiunous improvement.  He had a number of quoteable quotes including "Agile is not something you become, it's something you become more of."  Mike is a great speaker, and has a huge amount of software engineering experience.  He ended his talk with the thought that wouldn't it be great, if in 10 years time, we were referring to "Agile software development" as "software development"?  That the "Agile" would be implicit.

Overall, I believe the conference was a great success.  It was organised beautifully, it was full of influential and intelligent individuals and the scope and scale of the sessions was vast and appropriate.  I look forward to sharing my experiences and knowledge gained from the conference with my team at work, and hopefully we'll be able to change some things for the better.