Italian Agile Day 2007

Great event in Bologna, with some 300 participants and sessions going on the whole day across three different tracks, from classic sessions for beginners, to open space sessions for advanced discussion.

Very interesting relations and ideas were exposed, with most of the speakers sharing real life experiences. Most of the discussion revolved around how to introduce agility in a team, how to track agile projects, how to apply agility to legacy code, how to agile contracts, and even something about agility and ISO 9001.

I was very pleased to see how agility is gaining momentum even in Italy, despite our industry has been almost sinked in the last few decades, and the IT field is then suffering for the lack of serious engagement.

Below a personal list of concepts I have noted down for my future meditation and adoption (this list simply reflects my current state of thinking and professional needs; DEV=development, PM=project management, LGY=legacy):

1. DEV - Make stories/tests from bugs
2. PM - Reduce the work in progress
3. LGY - Refactoring cycle: 1) Select; 2) Break dependencies; 3) Write tests; 4) Refactor;
4. LGY - Test used/modified code only
5. Use a wiki for tracking
6. Use a Progressive contract as an umbrella/framework contract over multiple Fixed Price contracts for new development phases; use Time & Materials for maintenance and small changes (max 2 days).

The one thing I would criticize does not relate to the event itself, it relates to the content of most relations. Even Tim Mackinnon, the keynote speaker and well known agility pioneer, said it: you need OO technologies to be agile. IMHO this is plain wrong, and we should simply be talking about component based development, that is applying the most basic engineering principle: modularity. This is not a cavil: the nowadays widespread emphasis on OO technologies is making a lot of damages, mainly among the youngest professionals, all in the name of this idiotic idea that you can ultimately solve problems with tools-based/frameworks-based development. Welcome to the shop...