During the week of Aug 9-13, I trekked down to Orlando, Florida to join some 1,400 other computer geeks for a week-long conference known as Agile2010. If you were there, you don’t need me to tell you what it was all about; and if you’ve never heard of it, it’s easier for me to point you to the conference website than trying to provide my own feeble explanation. This conference, along with “sister” conferences on the related topics of XP (extreme programming) and Scrum, have been going on every year since the early part of this decade; but for various reasons (some good, some bad, mostly for reasons I can’t even remember) this is the first one I’ve attended.

Agile2010 made enough of an impression on me that I felt I should document my observations and conclusions, and then blog about it for the benefit of anyone who might be interested. Unfortunately, I had to dash off to Chicago right after the conference wrapped up, where I spent a very intense week fighting for truth, justice, and the American way; I’m not even sure what that means any more, but the point is that I was so preoccupied that I didn’t have time to even think about Agile2010, let alone blog about what I had seen and overheard.

This current week promises to be a little quieter, so I’m retrieving all of the scraps of paper that I used for note-taking, and will be blogging about the conference over the next few days.

I attended the relatively few keynote presentations — by Dave Thomas and Dave West — but didn’t take any notes. However, I did manage to take some notes during presentations by Sue McKinney, Jean-Michel Lemieux, Scott Ambler, Jim Highsmith, Pat Reed, Arin Sime, Diana Larsen, Peter Provost, several industry analysts (from IDC, Forrester, Ovum, and Gartner), Dean Leffingwell, Yves Hanoulle (whose slides are here on Slideshare), Mary Poppendieck, Ken Rubin, and Ellen Gottesdiener. That sounds like a lot, but it was only a small subset of the conference; because so many things were going on in parallel, there was simply no way that I (or anyone else) could attend the 227 sessions presented by 180 different speakers.

My overall impression is that “agile” (and its variations, such as scrum and XP) are now entering the “mainstream” of computer systems development, and that an “existence proof” is available in several areas where people used to say, “Well, it’s fine for tiny inhouse projects — but not for X…,” where “X” meant things like “large projects,” or “projects in regulated industries,” or “geographically distributed projects where the users and developers cannot be colocated.” But there’s still a lot of hype and exaggeration, along with a non-trivial amount of myth and folklore and general silliness. But when you strip away all of this, there is a very solid, and extremely well-documented, core of practical system development guidelines, concepts, strategies, and hard-won lessons that every practitioner in our field needs to know about.

I’ll try to summarize some of this in the days ahead. In the meantime, you might want to take a quick look at the Agile2010 photos that I’ve uploaded to my Flickr site.

Stay tuned…