I’ve been home from the Agile IT Experience for almost 24 hours now. I’ve had enough time to recover from the travel and lack of sleep. So, thinking back about the conference I have a few thoughts.
First, I really wish I could have gone to a session by Venkat Subramanian. He was one of the speakers I looked forward to seeing the most. But for one reason or another, each time he was doing a session I had enough reason to go to another session. Luckily my manager attended one of his sessions and gave me the details. My manager felt that it was a great session and agreed that Venkat is a fabulous speaker. He said he was laughing out loud at one point about a joke Venkat made that got a point across perfectly.
Second, Im super happy to have gone to all of Neal Ford’s sessions. The guy is a quote machine. He so clearly conveys his points that it is no wonder he is held in such high opinion in the industry. I also had a good chat with him about some ideas I had for our organization to adapt Use Cases to User Stories.
Third, I have a new interest in Fitness testing and Behavior-Driven Design. Thanks to Andrew Glover for his time after the session, I see a huge potential for BDD to grow into something big for design and testing over the next couple of year. I think its a little ways out, though.
Fourth… Continuous Integration is simply a must. I have skirted implementing it because, frankly, I was a consultant that dealt more on the integration side than the development side for so long that it didn’t seem to fit. Now as the lead technical person in a software development unit it is obvious that I can’t just talk about it anymore and actually need to make it happen no matter how much work it takes (Thanks to Jared Richardson for teaching me about technical debt).
Fifth and finally, attending conferences as good as this will empassion anyone with even the slightest interest in doing software development the ‘right way’ to go the agile route. I would recommend this conference highly to anyone. I have also have a new found interest in the other ‘No fluff just stuff’ conferences and really hope to get the rest of my team members to attend one soon.
mikewitters.com 
Leave a Reply