On 22nd and 23rd October, with a few other Touks, I’ve been to a very inspiring event – Agile By Example conference in Warsaw. It’s a place for all those that are trying their best to live and work with the Agile Manifesto in their minds, having ups and downs but always trying.
At TouK we value “working software over comprehensive documentation” and “customer collaboration over contract negotiation”. Even in difficult fixed price/scope/time projects we try our best to respond to change. So event like that is like a guiding light in our day to day coding :)
Gathering all details and thoughts for even few presentations is beyond blog post short format (and who reads long elaborates those days…) so I hope my quick digest with key highlights will be much lighter and less… boring :) Enjoy!
TL;DR
Agile is not dead!
In fact it is still holding strong and although many think nothing happens in this subject lately, agile movement evolves but still holds on to its roots.
Key takeaways
Jeff Gothelf — Sense & Respond: Continuously learning our way to better outcomes
- Feedback cycles are getting shorter, software is continuous, enables continuous improvements
- Agile -> agility to change course based on feedback
- Measure of success is customer value – but we need to keep an eye on real world consequences when optimizing our software for KPI/OKR
- Responsibility in software is of utmost importance, our work bears our ethical fingerprints, nowadays IT can be used to hurt people, so we have to pay attention and refuse work that harms people
April K. Mills — The Answer is in the First Line of the Manifesto
- Be agile by doing it and helping others do it
- Be agile by driving change, not driving people
- Invest in people & trust in people
Jurgen Appelo — Shakeup and Speedup
- Different phases of project need different methods & metrics & rewards, practices depend on business model maturity – innovators should be recognized for their experiments, leave OKR’s to the grown ups
- Use Innovation Vortex in your learning cycle (link)
- Separate innovations from profitable business model, as you learn more, you bet more
Bob Marshall — Barking Up the Wrong Tree
- AntiMatter principle: Attend to folks’ needs (link)
- We are trying to get better technology, processes, methods, tools – when we should be looking at people’s needs
Willy Wijnands — Transforming education with eduScrum
- Scrum is great for education! eduScrum teaches children to collaborate in an agile way, even changing changing some of the rules as they go along (link)
- Essential for today’s education – Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Creativity
- “Why” is the most important question
Full agenda and speakers can be found here: link, presentations will be released here: link.
I hope those few guidelines and key highlights will inspire you to dig deeper into subjects that may be useful in your day to day job. If there is more you wish to know – see you at ABE2020! :)
