What a grand conclusion for a year of Agile Success Tour events! High that my expectations of yesterday’s event in London were, the actual delivery and interaction with the participants surpassed them. As a matter of fact, I have not done as many customer 1-1′s in any of the previous events. Some of the interactions were with folks who came to the event from the continent. Remarkably, various customers stayed after the event to spontaneously dialog with other participants.
Speaking for Memex, Jim Mccumesty established the tone for the whole event. Agile to Jim is about:
- Making a real difference
- Changing patterns of individuals and teams
- Transforming ‘life styles’
Have no mistakes – Jim had a lot of hard methodical and technical data that he shared with the audience. It was clear however that for Jim the whole things is about doing good things through Agile. His passion was contagious.
Trevor Croft viewed the decision to go Agile by Misys as a matter of fitting software methods to business circumstances. Agile was chosen to due to intrinsic characteristics of their Business Intelligence projects. Specifically, Trevor highlighted the following factors:
- BI requirements would be constantly dynamic in breadth and depth
- Needed to be quick to market from vision to delivery
- Higher revenue –> emphasis on innovation
- Break out of waterfall nexus of first trapping all requirements
- Highly modularized factory production line approach for delivery
Trevor’s good points resonated with the trend highlighted by other panelists – the emphasis in Agile is moving toward:
- Delivering the right products; and,
- Delivering innovative products
Paul Lazarus of SpilGames equated Agile with growth. At the heart of it, SpilGame’s fast expansion from Holland to Poland and China was characteristic of the role Agile plays in the knowledge economy. Projects flow to the teams and to the talent, not the opposite way around.
David Hicks gave impressive highlights from the Nokia/Symbian/RADTAC work on the Symbian operating system over the past ten years:
- >50 MLOC!
- In a little over one year they are reaching the level of >1200 software engineers Agiling furiously in >120 teams
- All these folks/teams on a single software product with synchronized release trains every 8-12 weeks
It is enlightening to combine David’s data with Dean Leffingwell’s reports on his experience at Nokia. The affinity of their insights is remarkable. Dean, in collaboration with Juha-Markus Aalto from Nokia, published an excellent paper on the subject. Moreover, Dean is actually ‘binding’ together his insightful blog posts to publish a new book entitled Agile Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise. The book will be published by Addison-Wesley in early 2010.
Much more could and should be written about the London event. Until I have the opportunity to do justice to the subject, I will just mention my overarching conclusion from the event. The business interest in Agile in both the UK and in EMEA is as strong as the one in the US, if not stronger.
