Alan Cooper’s closing keynote turned out to be surprisingly good for me. There were points when I wondered where he was going, and whether I agreed, but by the end I was won over. His closing sentence was “Agile is the best thing to happen to Interaction Design”, and his key message seemed to be to iterate more at the start, and increment more at the end. Iterating early over a walking skeleton allows good understanding of the problem, after which incrementing becomes a less risky activity.
Finally, I was able to go to a repeat of some of Kenji’s sessions about Toyota and Lean ideas. The highlight was his translation of a Japanese video about what happened when a student of Tahichi Ohno want into a Sanyo factory and how a Kaizen, process improvement initiative went. Both informative and amusing!
That’s it for Agile 2008. Its been a different conference for me this year. On the one hand, I don’t feel to have been inspired by as many new ideas. On the other hand, I feel the kanban software development ideas are gaining traction, and I’m exciting about being able to contribute to this growing community.