We chatted about a favorite topic of mine: how to expand the horizons for Agile. My point is mostly that the Agile crowd is mostly talking about basic issues in software development, including during the Agile 2009 conference. I fear that this my give the wrong impression to beginners (“how, so we only need to do this and that, and we’re agile? Cool!”) and even to seasoned practitioners (“this Agile thing is not addressing my needs anymore”).
I would much prefer that we talk more about complex problems, whether they relate directly to Agile or not. This can include technical discussions or more touchy-feely ones. As long as we are addressing difficult problems, we will be making progress.

I also want to see more cross-domains talks. Obvious domains are the heavy industry (I won’t need to remind how influential Toyota has been to the IT industry) or performing arts. But that could also include things such as Behavioral Economics.

Or not. I don’t know for sure. However, I do know that we should be taking more risks. And stop presenting Introductions to Retrospectives for the upteenth time.

At the end of the talk, I mention 2 things for further reading. Here they are, plus a bonus book that I’ve just read:

• Implementation Patterns, by Kent Beck
• Rands In Repose, a blog on technological culture and managerial aspect of life in an IT firm; posts are not frequent, but very interesting (and long)
• bonus track: The Logic of Life, a book by Tim Harford; this is very much in the style of The Undercover Economist (his previous books, which I enjoyed a lot) and Freakonomics (ditto)

The podcast is available in French on the Vox Agile site.

Amongst the activities that might interest fans of the Java:

• the Programming with the Stars contest where pairs of developers wll be demonstrate their programming skills in front of a panel of three wise men. The language is up to the developers.
• the Developer Jam stage, particularly dedicated to programmers
• another stage that might be of interest is Tools For Agility
• Java developers might also relate to the Agile developer, Architect and Developer personas

Here are a few sessions with Java either as the main topic, or as the language used for demonstration:

• Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture with none other than Neal Ford
• Scala: Object-Oriented and Functional Programming for the JVM by Dean Wampler
• How to make your testing more Groovy by Paul King and Craig Smith
• Agile AJAX: The Google Web Toolkit Experience, presented by Daniel Wellman and Paul Infield-Harm
• Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl, with Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius
• Java and Ruby Tools for Code Quality, by Steve Hayes

For some other sessions, Java is not central, but will be at least mentioned:

• SOA and Color Modeling by Daniel Vacanti and Stephen Palmer
• Coding Dojo: Enhancing Legacy Code, presented by Guillaume Tardif and myself
• Executable requirements: BDD with easyb and JDave (will also mention Groovy), with John Smart and Lasse Koskela
• Clean Code III: Functions, with Robert Martin
• BDD clinic – the doctor is in, by Pat Maddox and Elizabeth Keogh
• Malleable Code:  How Tests Improve Production Code, by Eric Anderson
• Back to Basics – Writing Expressive Tests Without All The Wizardry, with Rod Coffin
• Test Driven Development in Java: Live and Uncensored, with Ben Rady
• Acceptance Testing Java Applications with Cucumber, RSpec, and JRuby, with Dean Wampler and Aslak Hellesøy
• Java Power Tools – getting it all together, with John Smart
• Applying Agile Development Practices to Atypical Technologies, from Scott Dillman
• Mission Impossible: TDD and JavaScript, by James Suchy
• Leveraging Maven 2 for Agility, with Tim Andersen and Luke Amdor
• Automated deployment with Maven and friends – going the whole nine yards, from John Smart
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests, by Steve Freeman

Check out the entire program on conference site!

Update (06/08/2009): should have mentioned that the Cast Codeurs podcast pretty much have the same information in French.

First, CITCON will be represented by Lydia Tripp and myself during the Freshers’ Faire at the Ice Breaker. Watch out for the CITCON easel pad… and world-famous t-shirts ;-)

CITCON alumni are now a big crowd (there are more than 750 mailing list members, and presumably many more attended the CITCON events). Many of them will present at the conference

• What does an Agile coach do? by Rachel Davies
• Coding Dojo: Enhancing Legacy Code by Guillaume Tardif & Eric Lefevre-Ardant
• ATTD In Practice, by Elisabeth Hendrickson (with Pekka Klärck)
• Continuous Integration of the World, by Patrick Debois
• Executable Requirements: BDD with easyb and JDave, by John Smart
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Test, by Steve Freeman
• Telling Your Stories: Why Stories are important for your team, by Rachel Davies
• Automated deployment with Maven and friends – going the whole nine yards, by John Smart
• Build Engineer Bootcamp: Builds As Code, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius
• Test Driven Development: Ten Years Later, by Steve Freeman (with Michael Feathers)
• Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius
• Visual Management for Agile Teams, by Xavier Quesada Allue
• CI vendor cage-fight! by Tom Sulston
• How to be really awesome at Continuous Integration, by Tom Sulston
• Java Power Tools – getting it all together, by John Smart
• Debugging Pair Programming, by Matt Wynne
• Narrative Acceptance Tests – A Behaviour Driven Approach, by Antony Marcano and Andy Palmer
• Continuous Testing Evolved, by Ben Rady (with Rod Coffin)
• Test Driven Development in Java: Live and Uncensored, by Ben Rady
• Exploratory Testing (Framework) Experience, by Erik Petersen
• Agile testers toolkit, by Erik Petersen
• How to make your testing more Groovy, by Paul King (with Craig Smith)
• Agile Tool Hacking – Taking Your Agile Development Tools To The Next Level, by Paul King (with Craig Smith)
• The Agile CTO, by James Shore (with Diana Larsen)
• Metrics in an Agile World, by James Shore (with Rob Myers)
• Slow and Brittle: Replacing End-to-End Testing, by James Shore (with Arlo Belshee)
• Creating Agile Simulations and Games for Coaches and Consultants, by Elisabeth Hendrickson (with Chris Sims)

Also, Lisa Crispin is producer of the Testing Stage. And don’t forget that many more CITCONers will be presenting on the OpenJam stage, too! I know I‘ll be.

Lastly, I will be appearing a one of the contestants in Programming with the Stars! This means that I’ll be paired up with a “star”, then we’ll try to show our mad programming skillz and outperform our competitors. This is incredibly exciting but also very intimidating. Although I consider myself a competent programmer, I am certainly not the best, and the participants at the conference are not exactly beginners. Scary!

Check out the conference blog for an account of how Programming with the Stars went last year.

• Implementing Scrum/XP Practices using Team Foundation Server, by Tommy Norman : how various practices, including CI, can be implemented using Microsoft tool
• Build and Test in the Cloud – CI and Cloud Provisioning for Agile Teams, by Darryl Bowler: demonstration of CI practices, with the twist of using cloud-based systems
• Java and Ruby Tools for Code Quality, by Steve Hayes: using Continuous Integration as a platform for code quality tools
• Top ten secret weapons for performance testing in an agile environment, by Alistair Jones and Patrick Kua: according to the session description, there will be a connection with CI; that could be really interesting
• Continuous Testing Evolved, by Ben Rady and Rod Coffin: CT will be presented as an extension to CI
• Killing the gatekeeper: introducing a continuous integration system, by Francis Lacoste: an experience report on applying a CI system
• Continuous Integration of the World, by Patrick Debois: integration of production environment using CI
• Agile Source Code Management using Stories, Agile Workflow, and CI, by Damon Poole: real-world techniques that allow change management of features, and synchronization with source code
• Executable requirements: BDD with easyb and JDave, by  John Smart and Lasse Koskela: not directly related to CI, but it will mention how to integration BDD with your build process
• WANTED: Seeking Single Agile Knowledge Development Tool-set, by Brad Appleton and Peter Alfvin: this talk will, among other things, talk about applying agile practices, including CI, to non-code knowledge development
• Patterns of Agile Adoption Practices, by Amr Elssamadisy: CI is one of a set of practices that attendants will be asked to prioritize for discussion
• Large scale continuous integration, by Hannu Kokko: real life experience, with hundred of developers
• Automated deployment with Maven and friends – going the whole nine yards, by John Smart: how to automate deployment using Bamboo, JIRA and Nexus in a real-world multi-module Maven web application
• Build Engineer Bootcamp: Builds As Code, by Paul Julius & Jeffrey Fredrick: will discuss build systems, a topic very close to CI
• Removing Integration Delays with Collocated Whole Teams and Multi-stage CI, by Damon Poole: why and to implement multi-stage continuous integration in large distributed environments
• How to run 4.5 Million tests per day … and why!, by Mark Striebeck: how Google implemented a huge CI system for its own needs
• Enabling Agile Testing through Continuous Integration, by Sean Stolberg: how a CI system enables agile testing practices
• Continuous Integration: Your New Best Friend, by Howard Deiner: what CI is, and how is fits with unit tests, acceptance tests and development habits
• The 7 Deadly Sins of Almost Being Agile, by Bob Hartman and Richard Lawrence: never integrating is one of the sins discussed
• Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius: not strictly about CI, but the tool discussed is the one that made CI popular, so this will be of interest to build experts
• Experiences Applying Agile Practices to Large Systems Development, by Harry Koehnemann: CI is one of the practices discussed
• Herding Cats: Managing Large Test Suites, by David Kessler and Tim Andersen: strategies to maintain automated test investments
• CI vendor cage-fight!, by Tom Sulston and vendors: 10 mins demos of all CI tools with representatives in the conference
• From Cowboys to Agilists – Organizational Change at Overstock.com, by Sean Landis and Kevin Steffensen: CI is described as one of the practices deployed to solve the software development crisis at overstock.com
• The Ogre and The Wimp: Clever Influencing Tricks – Help the Most Reluctant Teams, by Anda Abramovici: among other things, how to get the “I only run the build once a month” dev to do it every couple of hours, and how to get the “I only check in code once I’m completely done” dev to practice frequent check-ins
• Agile Infrastructure, by Andrew Shafer and Paul Nasrat: continuous deployment will be especially discussed
• Applying Agile Development Practices to Atypical Technologies, by Scott Dillman: CI is described as part of a case study
• How to be really awesome at Continuous Integration, by Tom Sulston and a panel of luminaries: discussion of the audience’s problems and questions
• Java Power Tools – getting it all together, by John Smart: use to how Hudson and other tools for a software development infrastructure

Phew! That’s quite a mouthful. Interestingly, there are many more talks listed here than I managed to get last year (and there are half as many talks this year). One reason could be that I was much more thourough this year, reviewing most of the sessions details — last year, I simply searched for keywords in the submission system.

To be honest, seeing as many sessions related to CI is rather a disappointment. I mean, CI is not a difficult practice, and you would think that many participants to Agile 2009 would be familiar with me. Plus, most sessions are introductions rather than advanced talks.

I guess I will content myself with Tom Sulston’s sessions (“Cage Fight” & “How to be awesome”).

• Staffan Nöteberg is back with The Pomodoro Technique: can you focus – really focus – for 25 minutes? this is the presentation I saw in 2008 that I liked so much (the pictures on the header on Staffan’s website are those I took then) An excellent (and entertaining) introduction to the Pomodoro Technique, I heartily recommend it.
• You say tomato, I say Pomodoro is another introduction to the technique, this time by Renzo Borgatti
• There will be a quick mention of Pomodoro in
  Ineffective Pairing, How To, a session that was a big success last year (I had fun rehearsing the pairing situations with Ryan Hoegg in the halls)
• finally, Staffan already told me he’s planning to arrange some kind of informal daily workshops where people will practice Pomodoro. I’m looking forward to that, as I have so far lacked the discipline to practice it regularly.

Coming up is XP Day Paris, May 25th & 26th (next week!). No less than 3 sessions will be presented by yours truly:

• Introduction to Retrospectives, with Laurent Bossavit
• TDD Explained to Managers, with Stephane Labati, a former colleague from Valtech
• Is Scrum Evil? a workshop with Guillaume Tardif — the session I’m most excited about!

I will be at the dinner on Monday evening as well; feel free to come and talk.

In August, I will be at Agile 2009 Conference in Chicago. This time, I will host a Coding Dojo on Legacy Code, with my partner in crime Guillaume.

Unfortunately, Is Scrum Evil?, a session I had proposed with Jeffrey Fredrick, has not been accepted. Fear not! We will be back with a revenge during the Open Jam part of the conference. I have hope many big names of the Agile world will join us. Promising session, trust me.

Next, September 18th will see CITCON Paris. This conference is dear to me — I have participated to all previous European CITCON events, and I am sure this will be one to remember. 3 months to go and the list of registrants is already closed!

As you may know, this is an Open Space event, so sessions are not known in advance and will be discovered during the opening session. Sounds scary? Wait until you suggest a session! ;-)

Other events of note this year will surely be Valtech Days 2009 and Devoxx. I have helped organize Valtech Days in 2007 and 2008; having left the company, it will not be the case this year, but, who knowns? I might still get to host a session.

As for Devoxx, I have never participated so far, but I heard so many good things that I really want to make the trip this year. We’ll see.

Well, this will be a busy year. Hopefully, I will have a few vacation days for non-techie stuff 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!