I spent much of this week in Salt Lake City at Agile2011. This year’s theme was 10 Years since the signing of the Agile Manifesto. It was very cool to have many of the original signatories present. I have had a chance to meet some in the past and met more this time. I was impressed by the humility expressed by many of them given what has emerged in those 10 years. I got a chance to personally thank one for making my current career possible.
I was honored to repeat last year’s collaborative work “Creativity for Teams” with Mark Levison. We had about 80 people attend, nearly twice the crowd as last year. The session was recorded and I will post a link when the video is available. We will post our slides asap. We have some other neuroagile (Mark’s term) offerings in the pipeline.
Highlights of the conference for me were:
- Barbara Fredrickson’s wonderful opening keynote about Positivity. It is so perfectly aligned with the Agile collaborative, value-driven mindset that we strive for as coaches and practitioners. The neuroscience evidence for her theories was an extra bonus for me. My main takeaways were that it takes at least 3 positives to nullify a negative 🙁 and other people matter 🙂 Plus the cool concept of “biobehavioral synchrony”.
- Elizabeth Hendrickson‘s session on exploratory testing in an Agile context. I knew within 5 minutes that it was a valuable choice. Not only was it fun to play with Scrabble Flash toys (doing exploratory testing), I got a chance to fill in a knowledge gap that I usually cover with clients by waving my hands and saying something like “And all this automated testing gives us time to do more exploratory testing, an art that I know nothing about.” And some reinforcement for using the word “check” instead of “test” for automation.
- Jez Humble‘s session on “Lean Startup Practices in the Enterprise”. He described the same sort of value stream consolidation I have been helping a client with – getting to where business-dev-ops are all on the same team. My client includes support as well. The idea is that we can reconfigure our functional departments into self-organizing teams so that each one owns a product all the way from concept to customer.
- Michael Sahota’s facilitation of a Thought Leadership Workshop for
- a serendipitous group of Scrum Alliance members using StrategicPlay® with Lego® .
We are posting the details here as time allows. - And, of course, great discussions with many friends in this very friendly community.
