In this slice about the Agile 2009 venue, I will write about the city, the hotel and include some elements from the two keynotes.

I liked to be in Chicago, it is a pleasant city with a breathtaking skyline. People asked me a couple of times, if I needed any help when I tried to figure out where I was on my city map. It looked like the residents were quite relaxed and helpful. Not like in some other US cities I have visited. The hotel was ok, but not special. Most of the conference rooms were located in the basement, so I used many of the breaks to get up and out of the building to breath fresh air.

Back in time, there has been a lot of innovation in Chicago and the city plans and architecture are quite unique. In 1871 there was the big fire in Chicago, where 17,500 buildings were destroyed, many people got homeless and a large part of the city had to be rebuilt. Chicago also had another very special problem: It stood on swamp. Actually they changed the catastrophe into an opportunity and found an innovative solution to the swamp problem by constructing the world's first completely iron-and-steel-framed building. The skyscraper.

It is interesting to think about the reason behind inventing and constructing the skyscraper. They had a huge problem, and found an elegant solution to solve it. That’s innovation! Maybe we could learn something about innovation by looking back at the invention of the first skyscraper?

In the second keynote at the Agile 2009 conference, Jared M. Spool talked about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs. Jared talked about how to integrate the needs from the users in the design process and not “just” build more software. “Unfortunately” he had several examples of companies using billions of $ on designs that did not deliver more business value. I think we often in the software community are more focused on delivering more software in a high effective way, than actually inventing the innovative solutions. The solution with the skyscraper was great, because it was a solution to a huge need after the big fire and the problem with the city on swamp. It was tomorrow’s solution for today’s problem.

We might find much more value by looking at why we build software rather than building more software faster and faster!

In the first keynote, Alistair Cockburn talked about agile being more main stream, the iceberg is melted down in the ocean. He also talked about how important it still was to have trust and effective communication. It was very entertaining, but I think there is still a long way to have agile out in the big enterprises.

By Mads Troels Hansen