Agile India

Organized in India for the second year now, Agile India attracts a fair following.  It was two days long, with loads of interesting sessions and workshops and dozens of bright people who were very easy to engage in hallway/lunchtime chats.  Craig Larman had a great keynote detailing many Agile versus Waterfall myths and facts from the history of software. See Jez Humble's blog entry on Craig's session.

I flew from Salt Lake City to get there (via Chicago and Frankfurt) and despite missing some connections and losing a bag for a few days, I got there in one piece.  I only stayed for 72 hours before returning, but I had a great time.  There were three sessions I was a part of:

#1 - TDD, Refactoring and Dependency Injection: Agile’s answer to “Big Up-Front Architecture” (BUFA)

The title is a bit of a mouthful, but it should have given a fair indication of the contents for the Indian audience attending my track (70 or so). Here is the 4Mb PDF.  As usual slide transitions and voice-over have been dropped, but there are plenty of screen shots and OmniGraffle graphics to keep the reader from falling asleep.

#2 - Panel. Topic: Agile and fixed bid contracts

I've always been lucky enough to not witness fixed-cost Agile first hand.  A sensible middle ground between the diametrically opposed "Yes, Agile can do them" and "No, Agile should run a mile" was "Do a fixed bid for a month, then when trust is established and stake-holders energized, move to the usual Agile style of procurement and sizing".

#3 - Selenium Workshop

I did a short intro to Selenium. In fact it was really a crash course. Then I shoved the assembled pairs into a competitive task using Selenium. It went pretty well. It could have benefited from more attendees, but the posted blurb suggested they should bring their own laptops. Even though that wasn't true in the end (we had a classroom full of suitably configured Windows PCs), it dissuaded a few.  I'm not going to post the slide deck or competition, as I hope I can present again at another conference.  The winners of the competition received iPod Shuffles.