Agile 2008 – Thursday

Thursday morning was take up with presenting “KFC Development”.  We were really pleased with how this went – around 20 people came along, and I think everyone stayed the course!  Unfortunately we ran a bit over and had to stop short the final simulation, but I think we had got the ideas across by then.  If you attended, please leave feedback in a comment!

In the afternoon I made it to Joshua Kerievsky’s “Estimating Considered Wasteful”.  It was great to hear someone like Joshua proclaiming that he didn’t use backlogs (“piles of stories” instead), timeboxed iterations or estimates.  It sounded like a very simple kanban system.  He also asserted that his wasn’t an advanced technique, which I also agree with.  Rather, I think were learning new ways of explaining and teaching these new ideas.  A couple of other new terms – feature fat (i.e. gold plating) and bargains (i.e. high value, low cost features)

The day finished with the conference banquet.  Bob Martin gave the keynote, and was on top form as usual.  A great political metaphor, comparing Scrum to Obama and XP to McCain. The 2008 Gordon Pask Awards were also announced.  It was delighted that the winners were Arlo Belshee and Kenji Hiranabe.  Arlo’s “Naked Planning” last year was big influence on my interest in kanban, and Kenji has also been a vocal kanban advocate. Kenji also arranged a performance of “Dear XP” at the banquet.  Rather then try and describe this, simply have a look!

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One comment on “Agile 2008 – Thursday

  1. You did a wonderful simulation with beads, dies, and cups, to understand and experience the advantage of pull over push. And also the bottle neck simulation using cards.

    Thank you!

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