Yesterday Jesper and I was doing an agile workshop as part of the Öresund Agile 2008 conference in Malmö, Sweden. I have to admit we had set out being pretty ambitious about the content of the workshop. We stuffed everything from Release planning, charting, coding, test-driving, continuously integrating, doing reviews, retrospectives, scrum meetings, planning poker, and discussing engineering practices and process improvement into just one day. I think we can conclude the workshop fully lived up to it's name -- Accelerated Agile!

With Malmö filled with swedish football fans, students celebrating final exams, and of course a lot of skilled people from the agile software community, we had some great days. Not only was it cool doing the workshop itself, but being at a smaller software conference where you actually get a chance to chat with most of the attendees I think is really valuable. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as we did (in time the feedback forms will tell!).

As promised during the workshop, we have of course put the latest (and hopefully greatest) version of all the slides online. You can download them from here.

After browsing through the pictures that was taken during the day, I selected some that you'll find below.

Notice the red and green lava lamps in the background. These were controlled by the CruiseControl CI server! I personally think that this was actually more than just a gadget. It brought great visiblity into the project. With these lamps connected to the build system, everyone who entered the conference room (or even looked through the door) could immediately spot if there was currently a problem. Now that is TRULY surfacing problems fast!

The self-organizing team working towards a common goal?

Some laid back discussions of interesting engineering practices.

Our one-day iteration ended with a retrospective, that judging from the smiles were rather positive.

All sorts of important stuff on the wall. Tasks, burn-down, WIP chart, and standard work sheets.

A big thanks to all the dedicated attendees, conference coordinator Gustav Bergman from Softhouse who invited us in the first place, and also Sonny, Lars and Thomas Lundström who assisted us during the entire day!

By Sune Gynthersen

During a presentation of the scrum principles this afternoon, participants were eager to discuss about what to put around a scrum process, feeling that something is missing in terms of well-designed architecture, thorough analysis of the domain and better knowledge about requirements.

Scrum is flexible and can fit into many different environments and uses, raging from product development, deliveries of customized software and maintenance inside an IT-department. It is also beginning to be spread into other areas than software industry!

So don't look for the silver bullet extension to scrum, but try to embrace the agile and lead principles when finding the right balance of planning your project.

One important lean rule:
If you need to decide on an important part of the system (e.g. your platform, database or ): Find out what is the latest responsible moment when the decision needs to be made. It is not easy, you will probably feel , but the longer you wait the more knowledge you will have the oppurtunity gain to support your decision, and you have the possibility to set start some experiments to search for alternatives. You might change your mind later regarding the latest moment, but that is the core part of agile practices: always be ready adapt to reality.

Don't be surprised if we write more on the lean and agile way of planning on this blog...

By Jesper Thaning