Agile Business Coach

XP2004 Experience Report

I am sitting in Garmish train station waiting for the train to take me back to Munich. It is a beautiful morning in a beautiful town. The sun is warming my back and the view in front of me is of the mountains.

Even though it has been a bit rushed, it has been a wonderful experience. XP2004 has been a success for me on many levels. I had some fun on the XP Customer panel and I drank some beers with old friends and new. It was such a good night that I cannot remember most of what was discussed. I met a number of fellow Bloggers such as Laurent Bossavit and Mike Feathers who I have only known by name until yesterday. It adds so much more meaning to the work when you know the person. We had a brief chat about Blogging and Mike Hill said that he prefered Wikis to Blogs because the Blog just shows your most recent thought whereas a Wiki allows you to structure your thoughts. I think he might be right. I intend to restructure my Blog and bring all my thoughts together on a couple of Blogs that link all my earlier posts together.

The most striking thing for me is that XP and Agile are a community. It is an inclusive group of people who welcome anyone to join. David Putnam from exoftware and I joined a group of about six sitting outside a bar which included Mike Hill, Mike Feathers and Diana Larson. The late afternoon sun was shining down on us as we sat under the trees. By the time we left for the Irish Bar, there was a crowd of about 20 to 30 people chatting and enjoying each others company. I got to renew my acquiantance with Diana and Martin Fowler as well as chat for the first time with David. As always, exoftware, an Agile Coaching consultancy, were well represented. I chatted with Brian and Sean, the two brothers who own the company, and agreed to put an advert on this Blog if they bought me beers all night. (They kept their part of the bargain, check out the site to see I kept my part.)

One of the messages I wanted to get out is that we are a community. We agilists are not competing against each other. I think everyone agreed. We would rather work with each other than work with “Waterfallists”. In any event, we will all be working for IBM/Microsoft/McDonalds (when they diversify into “feeding” the mind as well as the body) in ten years anyway when Agile is the accepted way of doing software development.

As always, the real heart of the conference lay in the conversations between the sessions. The sessions just provided some context to get the conversation flowing. So many ideas my head is spinning.

I was heartened by how many people are talking about business value. The meme for this year’s ADC is “Business Coach”.

I met so many interesting people. Unfortunately I have the memory of a gold fish and cannot remember most of their names.

I’m now on the train headed for Munich. As I reflect on my mad dash (14 hours travelling) from London to Garmish and back again for the one and one half hour XP Customer Panel, I’m just glad I made the effort.

Posted by chrismatts at June 9, 2004 8:32 PM