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Book your tickets for Orlando, FL! Due to the recent flooding in Nashville, TN the Agile Alliance announced that Agile 2010 is being moved from Nashville to Orlando. The event is being relocated to the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin hotel in Orlando, FL. The dates will remain the same – August 9th -13th – which means that speakers and schedules will remain the same. Many of us were looking forward to going to Nashville and staying at the Opryland hotel. However, according to one recent news report the historic Gaylord Opryland Hotel was significantly damaged in the flooding and might not reopen until the end of the year. Given the uncertainty of when a restoration of the hotel would be completed, show organizers decided to move quickly to identify new locations that could accommodate 1600 agile enthusiasts on such short notice. Not an easy task, but they did it!
If you’re planning to attend it’s not too early to register. Attendees are encouraged to register now to obtain the Super Early Bird and Early Bird rates. For more information or to register online, visit (http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/register.html). Should you require registration assistance, or have any questions, please contact Michelle Wilson at Elastic Communications & Events at agileregistration@elasticevents.com or 905-281-0555, Ext. 113. In its ninth year, Agile 2010 is the leading international conference on agile methods in software development, bringing together many disciplines in the fields of information systems and software development to foster the exchange of fresh ideas and best practices.

There’s an amusing article called “How I Stole an Office and Fixed our Daily Scrum” by Aaron Conoly on the Scrum Alliance website which describes how he improved their daily Scrum meetings. One of his tips for improving the daily scrum was to kick the boss out of the meeting. Once that happened people started working as a team, sharing information and getting things done! Imagine that! Is that what we call “self-organizing” in “Scrum”?

Failing to conduct daily Scrum meetings are often times a point of failure for teams moving toward agile transformations. Some teams see meeting everyday to be cumbersome if they are distributed, on different timezones, or too large. However, the “daily scrum” is the heartbeat of Scrum and critical to the success of using a scrum framework in software development. Other guidelines Aaron recommends to make the daily scrum successful are to hold the meeting early in the day, time box it to no more than 15 minutes, and have everyone attend and participate. Oh yeah – and don’t invite your boss to the meetings!

It seems to me that the true test of an individual’s belief in what he or she does is whether or not they would do it for free. Well, if you’ve ever wondered about how much a Scrum trainer believes in Scrum, InfoQ has just published a story on how a handful of trainers have put their money where their mouths are. According to agile reporter Mark Levison, a number of Scrum trainers have decided to make Scrum training, including ScrumMaster Certification, available to folks who could not otherwise afford it. CST Tobias Mayer has launched a program called WelfareCSM, which does just that. Likewise, three CSTs—James Coplien, Danube’s Dr. Dan Rawsthorne, PhD, and Alan Cyment—recently traveled to Serbia to provide free training to professionals who live in an area that doesn’t see too many CSM courses offered. In support of that effort, the Scrum Alliance even covered travel and other expenses.

In all, it was just a great and inspiring article that shows how much a few Scrum trainers believe in what they do.

Late last month, the Software Education SDC was held in Melbourne, Australia and Wellington, New Zealand. During the conference, Ivar Jacobson—who pioneered Use Cases, UML, and RUP—stated that agile needs to get “smarter.” Key to his criticism was the software industry’s tendency to jump on fashionable trends. To illustrate his point, he broke down the industry’s techniques du jour for the past 15 years like this:

• Fifteen years ago it was all about OO
• Ten years ago it was about components, UML, Unified Process
• Five years ago it was about RUP and CMMi
• Two years ago it was about XP
• Today it is about Scrum

Longtime readers know I’m an advocate of Scrum, which is the agile method that my team uses. I really see how it improves processes and gets our team to do things we didn’t think we could, so I hate to think of it as a fad. Certainly, its popularity has skyrocketed in the last year or two, but isn’t that due to its real potential to transform the way organizations approach software development? And aren’t all of these “flavors of the month,” as Jacobson suggests, part of a more macro-evolution in software development that extends well beyond agile? That is, as we discover new ways to work more effectively—or “smarter,” as Jacobson says—those new ways naturally displace the less effective methods that preceded them.

So is the history of software development over the last 15 years really a matter of faddish techniques and processes going in and out of fashion? Or is it simply a necessary evolution toward optimal working methods? You can read all of Jacobson’s concerns and suggested solutions at InfoQ.