Minimal

Chris asked for it, so here goes: a summary of XPDay 2005, through my dirty lenses.

Pragmatism: Tim Lister (co-author of Peopleware)

Great keynote, and a great masterclass. The former encouraged us to acknowledge our shortcomings—something the agile world’s not very good at, IMHO. The latter was a look at risk management that ignored agile for two thirds of its duration. Not such a bad thing. Much sense was talked. (I really should write this up better when I’ve got my notes to hand.)

Dogmatism: most other speakers I saw

Disappointing. Some described how they adopted agile without their managers’ consent or even knowledge—and were cheered for it. Some were arrogant and rude, unwilling to reason their arguments and unwilling to answer demanding questions with anything other than a stern "No!". Some were shameless self-promoters whose arguments didn’t stand up to any vague notion of common sense. Others still plugged tools and technologies that very clearly had severe shortcomings, all in the belief that agile says This Is Good™ e.g. FIT. The second day’s keynote and one of the main sessions even had nothing to do with agile at all.

When I think about how I spent 2 or 3 trackdays’ worth of my own cash on this, it saddens me. It was my third year on the trot, but I won’t be going back.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many parts of agile that I think are great—the early feedback and responsiveness to changing requirements, for instance—but there is also way too much dogma and, dare I say it, too much extremity. When pushing the limits, you need to be honest with yourself when things don’t work. FIT was a case in point: great in principle, sucks in practice. Please, if you’re doing agile development, keep the passion... just lose the blinkers.

Well, looks like I’ve pissed off the full set of religious fanatics now. :)