When slicing the Agile 2009 conference and looking at trends, there was a lot of talk about Kanban, Mainstream Agile and using Games for improving and learning Agile/Lean techniques. But also group dynamics, how we are working together, how we collaborate and how to create a shared vision were included in many sessions and discussions.

Games

There were many games at the conference, and it was very interesting to see how people got involved in another way when playing a game using Agile and Lean techniques, instead of trying to understand someone explaining some principles and practices. Using games in teaching will make it much more effective and fun. I will start to include more games in the future, when facilitating workshops.

Kanban

There was also a lot of "Buzz" about Kanban, and I can see a lot of interest in my Kanban talk on September 15^th. A Kanban system can be used to implement different Lean techniques in your Agile processes. It can be a more visible way to look at flow in the daily work, limit the work in progress, establishing a cadence etc.

I got a lot of interesting input to use on my Kanban talk on September 15^th and also to include a Kanban game instead of different exercises on the Kanban workshop on October 28^th.

Experience reports

Experience reports were also a main topic, and it is very important to capture and share the learning from real life problems, failures and success.

You can get the experience report I wrote for the conference from http://tinyurl.com/CmmiAgile and the slides from the Agile 2009 session on http://tinyurl.com/nk2g5p. It is about Agile with distributed team, scaling Agile teams, creating a kaizen culture across many teams and continues to deliver more business value.

Collaboration tools

Looking back at the conference, I also see a trend for more collaborative Agile tools. Many people talked about tools to support better collaboration and communication. I have a number of business cards from different venders, who created a new Agile tool with more collaboration and asked me to have a look at the free version. It will be interesting to see how those tools will evolve in the future.

I also talked with some people from EMC | Conchango and played with their integration between TFS and a smart board. See picture below. Using the smart board, you collaborate with stories from TFS, do estimation with planning poker cards and have the values saved directly back into TFS. A fun and costly solution.

EMC| Conchango software integration a Smartboard into TFS

A cheaper solution is the Wii virtual whiteboard from Johnny Chung Lee. http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/. It can be a easy way to make a virtual task board, see also this YouTube video.