Agile 2007 - Already Day 3!
Time flies when you're attending a conference. This is my first technology conference in a few years, and I'm loving it. And I'm immersed in the world of agile development and agile project management and all sorts of related topics.
I started out with an exceptional session by Christopher Avery on Responsibility, the author of Teamwork Is An Individual Skill. His views on Responsibility versus Accountability, and how that plays in an agile environment resonated quite strongly for me. The idea of a self-organizing and self-managing team must assume certain levels of responsibility. While there will always be accountability, the driving force - at least according to Avery - should come from Responsibility, which derives from self, rather than Accountability, which comes from without.
Yesterday I worked with Bret Pettichord (of Dovetail Software) and Charley Baker in presenting a session on "Scripting Web Tests with Watir" (of which Bret is the primary author and Charley is the "project manager" - an interesting term in an agile open source enviroment). The interest in both the idea of automated testing, and the specifics of how it can be done, was high. I learned a good deal from the questions and challenges of the attendees.
This morning I'm attending "The Gentle Art of Pair Programming" delivered by Wendy Friedlander and Oksana Udovitska from Oxygen. Since I've never been in a pair programming environment - in spite of reading about it and talking about it with my team - I'm excited to be in an immersive learning situation.
More to come.
