Susanne Bartel

I very much enjoyed the two days at my first agile conference, the XP-Days 2010 here in Hamburg, which were full of impressions, interesting people and talks, and new things to try out. Here my first personal resumè:

The plus list is very long: Well organized conference, very open, interesting people, highly interactive sessions. Only a few minor deltas for me: The location itself was very old school and somewhat dusty, some of the rooms were too big, with lots of reverb and didn’t work well for the format.

As I just recently attended a ‘traditional’ conference (PM-Forum 2010 in Berlin), I noticed quite a few contrasts and thought it would be fun to reflect on them. Please don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed both events, they were just quite different. Plus, I am part of both communities, so I’m allowed to joke about them ;)

Let’s start with some superficial observations about the individuals at the XP-Days, compared to the PM-Forum: As expected, the number of ties at the XP Days turned out to be … zero! Share of women was even lower than at the PM Forum (at 13%), with an estimated 5%. Definitely more piercings, goatees, sneakers, slightly younger folks. There were surprisingly few tweets on the first day, which spiked on the second day and afterward. We were probably all too caught up in the sessions at first! At the XP Days, business cards were much less important, as the biggest chunk of connecting happened via Twitter.

While the XP Forum was like a bee-hive only during the breaks, it was very lively also during the sessions at the XP Days. The sessions had much more different formats, only very few were in classic lecture / presentation format. Attendees were usually actively involved, in brainstormings, idea gathering, fish bowl sessions or good old discussions. The breaks between the sessions were often 30min or longer, and left enough room for a lot of interesting conversations. The two days at the XP Days certainly felt shorter.

A brief list of my favorite sessions, some more details to follow:

• Communities of Practice (Christoph Matthis), where I got a lot of ideas and concrete starting points for my work with the PMI Agile CoP.
• Roman Pichler’s session about Agile Requirements Engineering with Scrum – liked him in person as much as his books.
• Fish bowl on self organization, facilitated by Uwe Friedrichsen. I left this session with a sound view of self-organization and the biggest issues involved. See my session summary here.
• The Power of Feedback by Ralph Miarka and Deborah Hartmann-Preuss – it never hurts to be reminded of the power and good practice of feedback. Highlight: the appreciation shower!
• Rachel Davies’ keynote on the 2nd day with some concrete guidance and tips for agile coaches, where she reminded us to be patient, as change takes time, and not always is a good time for a change!
• Olaf Lewitz’ session “A good cook alone is not sufficient, you need a good kitchen as well”. I liked the metaphor very much, plus the session was well moderated, with attendees reflecting on the information flows between Scrum projects and the organization, what works and what could be done to remove impediments. Nice one!
• Jens Himmelreich was in ‘The agile Self’ courageous enough to talk about the dark side of the Force – the negative implications of the shift towards the “service economy”, with some rudiments of ways to protect oneself. Very valuable!
• I learned a lot about Kanban (and ScrumBan) from Olaf Lewitz, Arne Roock and Bernd Schiffer. Interesting stuff, helpful (though somewhat lengthy) exercises. WIP limits sound like a good approach to experiment with in Scrum teams, too.
• Bernd Schiffer enlightened us in the ‘decisive session’ about some of the more cognitive aspects of decision making, and presented some concrete examples of decision-making processes that deal well with our own cognitive limitations.
• Last but not least I attended Sven Roepstorff‘s Wildcard session about Magic Estimating, an agile estimating game derived from ‘affinity estimating’. We tried it out in teams, and it worked really well. Estimated 40+ stories in under 10 minutes. Will use this for our next big chunk of requirements. It is a good choice for a first pass – so much quicker than planning poker.

Overall, there was a ton of input, which will take some more time to digest. I will start into the next week with new impressions and ideas, looking forward to it!