Early this year we decided to attend the Agileee 2010 in Kiev, Ukraine after reading the positive reviews of Agileee 2009. Now – after several days in Kiev – we can tell you that this was probably one of the best conference we have attended for years. Not only good sessions but a lot of very interesting discussions with the participants during the icebreaker party and during the conference days.

Here our short summary of this fantastic conference:

Thursday – Sightseeing and Icebreaker Party

On Thursday we visited the headquarters of Ciklum – one of the largest nearshoring providers in Ukraine. We were introduced to several Scrum teams working for different clients and we were allowed to take part in a Daily Scrum via video conference (client in Denmark). Our summary to this visit is a very positive one. What we saw exceeded our expectation on agile adoption and English skills by far.

After our visit at Ciklum we decided to spend the afternoon sightseeing in Kiev.

Monastery of the Caves

We have been  told a lot about the Kiev Monastery of the Caves and so we decided to visit this world famous attraction. It’s a really impressive monastery that includes caverns – a very complex system of (very) narrow underground corridors.

You can find more information about this monastery in Wikipedia:

Kiev Pechersk Lavra (Ukrainian: Києво-Печерська лавра, Kyievo-Pechers’ka lavra), also known as the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, is a historic Orthodox Christian monastery in Kiev, Ukraine. Since its foundation as the cave monastery in 1015 the Lavra has been a preeminent center of the Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Eastern Europe.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_Pechersk_Lavra

Icebreaker Party

In the evening we have been invited to the icebreaker party held in a local pub called “The Barrel”. First we were reluctant to go there as we were quite exhausted by the tourist program we had but we finally got our self moved to the party place. WHAT A FANTASTIC DECISSION! Yes, this was probably the best conference start I have been for years. This was purely relaxing. Several speakers gave spontaneous Jam sessions and it was a fantastic friendly atmosphere.

Agileee 2010 Ice-breaker from Agile Eastern Europe on Vimeo.

Guess what the German conferences are lacking? Such an icebreaker event!

Friday & Saturday: Agileee 2010 Conference

After finishing the registration and getting rid of the clothes we were welcomed with classical music played live!

Infrastructure

The conference had the usual infrastructure including WiFi– and this was a problem. As everybody was using WiFi enabled devices it was sometimes not possible to connect to the internet. The day before the conference started we bought a very cheap 3G SIM card from a local provider (available everywhere in small shops) with some free hundred megabytes of internet access – so no big problem for us.

Keynotes from Henrik Kniberg and Mary Poppendieck

The conference program started with two key notes given by Henrik and Mary. While both were interesting I liked the keynote from Henrik more as it introduces some new ways how to explain the essence of agile to people new to Scrum / XP.

Selling Agile by Paul Klipp

Selling projects done in an agile way is usually hard work as most buyers still believe a fixed price contract is best for them as all the risk is on the side of the provider. If you have been involved in calculating and setting up a project based on a fixed price contract you know that this is not true. Usually both sides have to pay for the risk and changes during the project will result in a lot of discussion and additional costs. So fixed price usually is a lose-lose setup. In his presentation Paul outlines why projects run with agile principles and based on an agile contract are better for both sides. Really liked his arguments and tips.

Management of Offshore Agile Projects

This presentation given  by Sergei Andrzeevski caused a discussion whether what he does is still “agile” or just some best practices that can be used to make distributed projects more successful. As we know that the trade off between real agile practices and compatibility to traditional established company processes always must be considered, we were happy to get some new ideas how to handle problems.

Agile Offshoring

We met Andrea Heck and Tibor Vida at the ice breaker party and had some interesting discussions with them. In their presentation they were talking about how agile methods were introduced at Siemens healthcare.

Siemens healthcare is working in a very regulated environment with audits that are necessary for markets like EU, USA, China or Brazil. Something you would expect is difficult to combine with agile processes. They explained how they started (very strict contracts with incentives, V-Modell (phase oriented process model) widely used, documents as interfaces, a lot of overhead by managers, task forces, experts, …) and how they made a successful transition to agile processes by bringing in external experts and visualizing the business processes by value stream mapping. Guess they made a really good job there!

Meeting a lot of interesting people.

Beside the official presentations I had a lot of very interesting discussions in the breaks and enjoyed several interesting open space discussion: One with Paul Klipp about “Personal Productivity”, one about "How to transform the company from outsourcing to product business?" with Nikolay Pavlov and one about “Smells in your Scrum implementation” by Radu Davidescu. Thanks guys for sharing your ideas and experience!

Another important reason for traveling to Kiev was meeting one of our oldest partners: Ainstainer Group. We finally made it to personally meet the Semenov brothers (Artem and Stanislav) and had a lot of discussions how we can help our customers to succeed using agile processes and teams located in the Ukraine.

While Ainstainer Group currently still is a quite small company you can expect to hear more from them in the future as the management is very dedicated to success, having a clear customer focus and is working in a highly professional manner.

BTW: We (Ainstainer Group & Agile-Nearshoring.com) started a “Scrum Tool Review project” for which the first review (VersionOne) is already available in the Ainstainers Blog.

Summary

Not more to add: Was a great conference, we will be there next year again!

Disclaimer: This article was initially published on the Agile-Nearshoring.com blog. As there are still only a few readers registered I decided to publish it on Armerkater.de to reach a wider audience.

Die Folien zu den Vorträgen der JAOO Conference 2008 können heruntergeladen werden:

http://jaoo.dk/aarhus-2008/schedule/wednesday.jsp

Es sind einige interessante Vorträge zu agilen Themen dabei:

• Henrik Kniberg: What’s Hard About Becoming an Agile Software Developer?
• Guido Schoonheim & Jeff Sutherland: Fully Distributed Scrum: The Secret Sauce for Hyperproductive Outsourced Development Teams. (Hinweis zu Video – s.u.- beachten)
• Petri Haapio: Can a global company of 60 000 people with strong legacy culture change its habits?
• Dave Thomas: Lean and Agile In the Large – Principles, Practices and Experiences for Large Scale Software Development

Zusätzlich gibt es einige Videos:

http://jaoo.blip.tv/posts?view=archive&nsfw=dc

Das Video “Offshoring Agile Projects” hatte ich bereits vor ein paar Tagen empfohlen.

Die BOF-Sessions – die es dieses Jahr zum ersten Mal gab – fanden anscheinend nicht den erhofften Anklang. Lediglich drei Sessions wurden vorgeschlagen, das Interesse war eher gering. Schade eigentlich.

Sessions

Advanced Eclipse BIRT Report Customization

Virgil Dodson, Actuate Corporation

Virgil konnte in seinem Vortrag einige Einblicke in die weitergehenden Konzepte von BIRT geben. Interessant war hier v.a. welche Möglichkeiten zur Beeinflussung der Reports existieren. Insgesamt war der Vortrag jedoch ein bisschen hektisch, zu viele kleine Informationsstückchen in kurzer Zeit.

Datenschaufler für Java

Frank Pientka, IMPAQ AG

Vortrag zum Thema ETL (Extraction Transform Load) mit überraschend vielen Zuhörern. Laut Frank ist das Thema ETL ja eher die “Schmuddelecke” der IT ;-)

Es wurde ein guter Überblick über Ansätze und Werkzeuge in diesem Bereich gegeben. Die Vorteile von Open Source Lizenzen wurden benannt (weniger Risiken, mehr Flexibilität, weniger Abhängigkeit) und das Thema ETL wurde auf der Gartner Hype-Kurve als “aufkommend” dargestellt.

Etwas genauer wurde auf die beiden Tools Kettle und Talend eingegangen. Sehr interessant, würde mich auch mal gerne damit beschäftigen – schließlich wollen meine Entwickler immer Unsummen für Importer/Migrationen investieren ;-)

Subversive and Fast Track – a Perfect Match

Timothy Ströbele, Polarion Software GmbH

Subversive als SVN-Integration in Eclipse, Fast Track als Issue-Tracker, der alle Informationen in SVN speichert. Super Lacher wurden durch die Popups in der Präsentation ausgelöst: “… your audience might get  tired” oder “They may be already asleep by now”.

Quelle: http://www.jfs2008.de/jfs/2008/folien/C5..pdf

Geschäftsprozesse & Regeln mit jBPM & Drools – ein unschlagbares Team

Bernd Rücker, camunda services GmbH

Die Einführung in jBPM und Drools hat mein Interesse an diesen Frameworks/Tools geweckt. Wenn ich (irgendwann mal) Zeit habe, muss ich mir jBPM und vor allem die Rules Engine Drools unbedingt mal ansehen ;-)

Collaborative Software Development – Developing Software like a band plays Jazz

Dr. Erich Gamma, IBM Rational

In dem Vortrag wurde die team-orientierte Entwicklungsumgebung (“collaborative development environment”) Jazz vorgestellt. Erich hat sehr deutlich darauf hingewiesen, dass Jazz KEIN Open Source Projekt ist und alle Elemente (SCM, Items, Build, Reporting) neu entwickelt wurden. Da alles neu geschrieben wurde, konnten alle Prozesse und Komponenten aufeinander abgestimmt werden. Dadurch ist es mit JAZZ möglich über Work Items alle Aktionen von der Erfassung von Anforderungen bis zum Deplyoment nachzuvollziehen.

Auf die Frage, ab welcher Teamgröße JAZZ Sinn machen würde, hat Erich darauf hingewiesen, dass es sein Ziel ist, dass die Plattform für Teams ab zwei Personen sinnvoll nutzbar ist. JAZZ “darf nicht im Weg stehen”.

Wer eine neue Plattform für die Softwareentwicklung sucht, sollte den Einsatz von JAZZ einmal prüfen. Eine kostenlose Community Edition existiert.

Mittagessen

Wie schon letztes Jahr, gabs lange Schlangen vor dem Buffett – das kann man sicherlich besser organisieren! Teilweise waren die Buffetts auch recht schnell leergeräumt, das Personal kam mit dem Auffüllen nicht nach. Die Qualität des Essens war früher im SI-Center auch besser ;-)

Abendveranstaltung

Wieder Schlangen – diesmal vor dem Bierausschank. Auch dieser Teil war im SI-Center früher besser, v.a. weil die Lokalität sehr steril wirkt.

Am 3. Juli ist es soweit – das diesjährige Java Forum Stuttgart findet statt! Wie die letzten Jahre auch, werde ich hinfahren um Bekannte zu treffen und einen Überblick zu bekommen, welche “heißen” Themen gerade wichtig sind.

Die erwarteten 1200 Teilnehmer können zwischen 42 Vorträgen (6 parallele Tracks) auswählen. Die Themen sind vielfältig und für jeden, der sich im Java-Umfeld bewegt, sollte etwas dabei sein.

Ich werde wohl zunächst zwei Vorträge zum Thema Reporting und Datenverwurstung/ETL ((Extraction, Transform, Load) besuchen und dann spontan entscheiden, ob ich zunächst ein paar Aussteller besuche oder welche Vorträge ich vor der Mittagspause noch ansehe.

Am Nachmittag möchte ich zunächst einen Vortrag zur Verwaltung von Items (Bugs, tasks etc) in Subversion ansehen und dann werde ich versuchen noch rechtzeitig zum Vortrag von Dr.  Erich Gamma zu kommen bevor der Raum überfüllt ist.

Abends dann die Abendveranstaltung, ich hoffe ich treffe eine Menge bekannter Gesichter ;-)

Neu dieses Jahr sind BoF-Sessions. Mal sehen wie das beim JFS funktioniert.