Agile 2011 - Highlights

August saw the Agile 2011 Conference take place in Salt Lake City. Over 1600 people attended the conference to share experiences and learn lessons from expert practitioners. With over 200 sessions, this was probably the largest gathering of Agile experts ever assembled. In a sign of the maturity and mainstream acceptance of Agile, over 60 senior level managers came together in an Executive Forum to discuss the impact that Agile is having on their organizations.

As you would expect, ThoughtWorks was well represented at the conference with 10 speakers covering topics as diverse as "Applying the Lean startup model to the Enterprise" through to "Creaky Platforms: Tackling legacy technology challenges".

In this issue of Perspectives, we give our view of some of the conference highlights. Tim Brown talks about some of the subjects that ThoughtWorks presented on, as well as his view of the more interesting topics discussed over the 5 days. Jim Highsmith also shares his experiences of the conference, and revisits a 2001 interview with Ken Schwaber to reflect on how far the industry has come in the last 10 years.

In this video, Tim Brown provides a round-up of some of the things we were talking about and hearing about at the Agile 2011 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Jim Highsmith Reflections on Agile 2011
In this blog post, Jim Highsmith talks about his experience at the Agile 2011 Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, earlier this month.

Pat Kua "We do TDD." Oh really?
During Agile 2011, Pat spoke to a number of people about the technical practices they used and the degree to which they implemented them. During the course of his conversations, it seemed to him that many were finding the best people, hiring the best coaches, and then forgetting to schedule time for appropriate training. In this blog post, he discusses his observations and makes some suggestions for improvement.

Jim Highsmith An Interview with Ken Schwaber (circa 2001)
After attending the Agile 2011 Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, where 15 of the 17 Agile Manifesto authors got together, Jim Highsmith recounts an interview with a fellow co-founder, Ken Schwaber, that he published in his 2002 book, Agile Software Development Ecosystems; one of many interviews that reflect the state of the industry and what the founders of the Agile movement were thinking a decade ago.

Webinars ThoughtWorks webinar series on Continuous Delivery
ThoughtWorks is offering a series of webinars on Continuous Delivery. The webinars are scheduled to run monthly over the next year. The webinars will cover topics such as DevOps, leadership and integrating processes, and methods for optimizing the entire production and release cycle.

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Continuous Delivery wins Jolt Excellence Award; Domain Specific Languages also in top six
August 16, 2011 – Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, by Jez Humble and David Farley, has won a Jolt Award; it has been named one of the six best books developers should read. Domain-Specific Languages, by Martin Fowler (with Rebecca Parsons), also features on this list.

ThoughtWorks announces results of the Agile Adoption in India Survey 2011
August 18, 2011 – ThoughtWorks, Inc. today announced the results of their recently conducted "Agile Adoption in India Survey - 2011". The survey was carried out earlier this year in partnership with CIOL to understand the Agile adoption trends in business and IT in India. The survey captured responses from 770 IT practitioners and executives from 330 organisations across the country. As a global consultancy noted for its experience and expertise with Agile software development, ThoughtWorks was keen to understand the patterns, successes and issues that companies in India experience as they make the transition to this more collaborative and adaptive method of developing software.