Besides all the fun and small talk, Bob Martin actually had something to say. His point was to introduce, half-jokingly, a 5th statement to the Agile Manifesto (most readers will know that he was part of the seminal retreat at Snowbird; in fact, I believe, he was the one originally with the idea of getting those people together):

Craftsmanship over Crap

which he subsequently corrected into

Craftsmanship over Execution

(see why he decided to alter his proposal)

His point is that we should always insist to act as professional and insist that well-engineer projects are superior. Yes, there will be cases where executing (ie. delivering early, with little regard to code quality) will be more important. But in general, we should resist simply delivering projects quickly.

A couple of quotes to drive his point home:

• “The only way to go fast is to go well”
• “TDD is not controversial any longer… especially if the tests are written first” ;-)

Bob Martin also had fun words about methods. Here is one (hoping I haven’t missed too much):

“Scrum is the Open Space of processes. The bugs that come are the right bugs. The specs that come are the right specs… and the managers should all be fired!”

Unfortunately, I forget what he said exactly about eXtreme Programming. It was around the lines of paraphrasing the 10 Commandments or something: “Thou shall pair program!” “Thou shall have common code ownership!”

Making fun of both processes was just to drive his point that neither were self-sufficient. Rather, they would benefit from being used together.
Bob Martin, Uncle Bob, was able to deliver a fun, content-packed speech. This was a surprise to me, not having met him before. I hope you’ll have a chance to see him in action as well.

I unfortunately do not have time right now to post more on the conference. If you can read French, you will find several posts by me and other colleagues on the Valtech Blog. Also, you might want to check out my photos on Flickr.

Until Agile 2009, I’ll be looking forward to Agile Tour France in October, CITCON Amsterdam October 3rd & 4th, and Valtech Days Paris October 21st & 22nd.

Maybe I’ll meet some of you there. But first, I’m going a few weeks on holiday. See you in September!

Quick overview: the idea is that a kitchen clock greatly helps focusing for a period of time, 25 mins nominally. Then, there are a few techniques to fend external (and internal!) interruptions. A couple simple tools such as a todo list and a tracking sheet are useful too.
I won’t go into the details, but the technique seems worth looking into. Very close to the concept of GTD – Getting Things Done.

I loved the hand-drawn slides! A fresh change from the usual.

Also, check out all my pictures from Agile 2008.

Update (10/08/08): I am happy to report that this session has been selected by the other participants for the re-runs on the last day. Maybe this post helped? ;-)

The kind folks at Naked Agilists are willing to help you on that. They have interviewed some of the track organizers and Laurent Bossavit is presentating Breaking Acts, one of the richest tracks, which he organized with help from your truly.

Participating companies are also guilty of that.

One such is SolutionIQ, who boasts “more speakers than any other services organization in attendance“. I have counted 9 speakers and 9 presentations on their page.

Well, at Valtech, we have “only” 8 presenters, plus one organizer (yours truly): Greg Hutchings, Gilles Mantel, Dave Nicolette, Ryan Hoegg, Mark Smith, Andrew Rendell, Alan Goerner and Tim Walker. But they will host a total of 12 presentations:

• Greg Hutchings: Distributed agile teams and alternative contractual forms: what works best?
• Greg Hutchings: Contractualisation des projets Agiles
• Gilles Mantel: Test-Driven Requirements – Beyond Tools
• Tim Walker: Scrum Accelerator: The Game
• Dave Nicolette: Effective Pairing: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• Dave Nicolette Manager’s Introduction to TDD, with Karl Scotland
• Dave Nicolette: Overcoming Resistance to Change, with Lasse Koskela
• Dave Nicolette and Ryan Hoegg Advanced TDD Randori & Fishbowl
• Mark Smith: The use of Ritual in Agile currently and identifying improving ways to harness the power of ritual
• Andrew Rendell: Effective and Pragmatic Test Driven Development
• Alan Goerner: The Tail and the Dog: Aligning Governance with Agile Project Management
• Alan Goerner: The Aikido of Agile Project Metrics

So, there! ;-)

Agile 2008 is just around the corner, and I’m particularly eager to hear the latest about CI. Here is a selection.

• David Vydra will host a Workshop on build/test grids and selective testing tools, the goal being to inventory current techniques and tools and to actively imagine promising future directions and features.
• Damon Poole from AccuRev (an SCM) will demo their tool in “advanced multi-stage continuous integration”
• Christian Gruber will demo Maven 2 & Continuum
• Owen Rogers and Sreekanth V will talk about CI in the context of Continuous Monitoring, with a touch of Lean (sounds interesting)
• Damon Poole and Joshua Sherwood invite you to “See Large Scale Multi-Stage Continuous Integration in Real Time”
• Graham Brooks will give tips in keeping build times down
• Ade Miller (from Microsoft, unexpectedly) will report about CI in a distributed environment and about the basic objections people have to CI
• Maciej Zawadzki from UrbanCode (I met him at CITCON Brussels; they do AntHillPro) will talk for 3 hours on the history, current state, and current practices of CI
• Fabrizio Cannizzo and Raghav Ramesh will be Pushing the boundaries of testing and CI, especially with regards to performance, scalability and robustness
• Usman Muzaffar from Electric Cloud (their CI tool is ElectricCommander) will debate validating against all target platforms/environments before check-in and running CI in “Better, stronger, faster continuous integration – Jump-starting the agile heartbeat”
• Fabrizio Cannizzo and Paul Moser will talk about usage and organizational impact of CI in their 50-strong team in “Evolution of the Tools and Practices to Achieve Organizational Change”
• Pramod Sadalage will talk about making database development part of CI (something I’ve been trying to promote in recent assignments) in “Managing Database Development on Distributed Teams”

Those are just the ones frontally addressing CI. Many others will mention it in their talks. Others too will talk about automated testing, a crucial aspect of CI. For example, I’d recommend:

• Joshua Graham’s talk about JTestMe, a tool that can run the tests that depend on the particular classes that have been checked in. This is one that I will not miss.
• Patrick Wilson-Welsh and Lisa Crispin talking about “Agile Automated Testing Strategies: Flipping the Testing Pyramid Right-Side-Up”

Cannot get enough Continuous Integration? Meet others enthusiasts at CITCON Amsterdam, October 3 & 4.

Update 25/07/2008: David Booth from JetBrains (the guys who do the CI tool TeamCity) told me that David Vydra in fact does not work for JetBrains. Fixed that. Sorry.

Considering that the deadline is February 25th, now is a good time to submit your own proposal. If you feel you might have new, or counter-intuitive ideas to share, consider submitting to the Breaking Acts stage. Many other categories also await your topics.

While you’re at it, read Rachel Davies telling the story of the Agile 2008 conference. Also, check out the video of Grigori that explains how to use the submission system.