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During the second week of August the Agile 2011 conference was held in Salt Lake City (SLC). As you likely know the Agile Manifesto was formulated 10 years ago in SLC so it was apropos to hold it there. There was some excitement around the 10 year anniversary of the manifesto, with a panel session with the 17 authors of it. Sadly there seemed to be little excitement around the efforts of the 10th anniversay agile workshop in February which proposed a potential path forward for the agile community. I found the conference to be an evolutionary improvement over the conferences of the past few years, which is a very good thing because the focus since 2008 has moved beyond the "cool" new programming techniques to include the issues that enterprises face.
Starting at the Agile 2008 conference I've seen an uptick in interest in what I would consider some of the more mature topics in agile development, although I'm unfortunately still seeing significant confusion out there too, in part due to over-exuberence of people new to agile. For example, there's people still asking about basic issues about agile architecture and agile database techniques, although I was really happy to see more coherent discussions around scaling agile. My own presentation about the Agile Scaling Model was well attended and I suspect I opened a few people's eyes regarding the realities that we face (yes, there's a lot more to it than holding a "scrum of scrums", yeesh). We have a long way to go until people really start to understand scaling issues, but we're clearly on the path to getting there.
The conference show floor was interesting, with a wide range of vendors offering services and products focused on agile and lean. One thing that I noticed was many vendors had large monitors showing off their ability to support lean task boards, which for the most part they all looked the same. At the IBM booth we were showing off some of the Jazz tools, in particular Rational Team Concert (RTC). For a long time now we've been giving away fully functional, with no time limit, licenses of RTC for teams of up to 10 people. Something worth checking out.
The Agile 201x conferences hosted by the Agile Alliance are always a good investment of your time and money, and Agile 2011 was no exception. See you at Agile 2012 in the great state of Texas!
