AgileIndia 2013 Summary

March 8, 2013

This is the summary about the recently concluded Agile India Conference 2013. This gave me a chance to interact with great legends and leaders of software industry such as Linda Rising, Mary Poppendieck, Henrik Kniberg, Jez Humble, Jeff Patton, Fred George, Craig Larman, Neil Ford, Venkat Subramaniam, Aslam Khan, Karl Scotland, Kenji Hiranabe, Laurent Bossavit, Rebecca Parsons etc. and listen to them multiple times in the span of 4 days. Amazing.

I am not going to write about each session I attended, am instead summarizing what I learned during those 4 days both by attending the sessions and by interacting with the speakers during those 4 days:* Never stop learning. Experiment continuously.

• Experiments may fail, but learn from it and move on.
• Analyse why am I (whatever it is), and be innovative. If you delay innovation, it becomes worse.
• Great software can be created only with collaboration. So work as a team and share the responsibilities.
• Be a good coach rather being authoritative. This will help to implement changes effectively.
• Optimise the entire delivery process instead of just optimising the development process. Kanban helps to while Scrum helps to optimise only the development.
• Have tight feedback cycles by applying timeboxing mercilessly. This will help for continuous learning and improvement. Eg: 15 minutes TDD cycles which result in simple design with refactorings, Frequent Retrospectives etc.
• Apply Last Responsible Moment across, eg: Use practices such as Emergent Design and Evolutionary Architecture instead of doing. The Code complexity reports should help to identify the coding smells which helps to implement these practices.
• You can defer writing tests until the validation of feature is done. Adding acceptance tests for stability can deferred when you feel that it’s time to have more stability

Thanks a ton to Naresh Jain and team for organising such a wonderful event. Curious to know what’s coming for Agile India 2014. :)