The Agile Alliance have recently launched a new Learning Center, with the highlight at launch being the availability of keynotes and selected presentations from the Agile 2011 conference.
The keynotes and special events from the conference held in August in Salt Lake City are freely available for viewing.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Agile Manifesto, an historic park bench event reunited fifteen of the seventeen original authors, and the video provides some good insight as to how the manifesto came together and what the authors think about the state of Agile now. The presentation is hosted by Laurie Williams who eloquently sums up the reunion:
...though their unity, this group rocked the software industry. …They could have decided to compete with each other when this new lightweight iterative thing came out but, instead, they decided to join forces. And because they joined forces, everyone is here today and there has been a tremendous impact for the industry.
Drew Jemilo shared a couple of his favourite moments from the reunion in a post on the Fast Frontier blog:
My favorite one liner? “At snowbird 10 years ago, it was the last time this group of people agreed on anything”. The most thought provoking? Alistair Cockburn said that the next frontier for Agile is when the word evaporates. “It will just be what we do.”
The full keynotes from Barbara Fredrickson entitled “Why Care About Positive Emotions” ,Kevlin Henney talking about “Code” and the highly lauded keynote from Linda Rising about “The Power of an Agile Mindset” are also available. A recent twitter post from Michelle Sliger sums up the reaction from the majority of attendees to the Linda Rising keynote:
I'm thinking about making this Linda Rising keynote on Agile Mindset a prereq for my courses: http://www.agilealliance.org/resources/learning-center/keynote-the-power-of-an-agile-mindset Must see!
A selection of introductory presentations from the conference are available to Agile Alliance mailing lists subscribers and members. There are a number of introductory talks from high profile members of the Agile community including Robert C. Martin, Mike Cottmeyer, Dale Emery, Esther Derby and Jeff Sutherland. Jill Henry has an overview of Jean Tabaka’s talk on “The Golden Circle of Transformation” on her Agilist Notebook blog:
Jean challenged us to think beyond the individual practices we are doing with our teams – standups and sprint reviews in Scrum, pair programming and continuous integration with XP, etc. She led us through determining what our ‘book of guidelines’ is: what are the guiding principles that we use to tell whether the practices we are using are effective and when we need to add, modify, or remove any of them. The Golden Circle refers to concentric circles with ‘What’ (the practices), ‘How’ (how we know whether they are working and when to change them) and the ‘Why’ of using Agile.
A number of practicing and expert sessions from the conference are also available exclusively to Agile Alliance members. These presentations are a mix from all of the different stages and include presentations from Arlo Belshee, Mary Poppendieck, Jim Highsmith, Dean Leffingwell and Stephen Denning to name a few. Patrick Kua on his blog shared some thoughts on the session by Chet Hendrickson and Ron Jeffries entitled “What We Have Learned So Far”:
… they looked at some of the ways people took some of their recommended methods in XP and how they would modify it now understanding the passage of time. Practices and principles they would still keep included frequent releases, simplicity, solid technical practices, reality based management and cross functional teams. The things they would revisit included the estimation and planning process (using points and velocity for planning) because it didn’t change people’s mindsets – only worked to satisfy people’s questions “when would it be done” and that “agile” was a bad name because it was too good.
A full list of presentations can be found on the Agile Alliance website in the Learning Center.
If you were at Agile 2011 and attended any of these presentations or you have viewed the presentations and have any recommendations, please leave your thoughts in the comments.
Full disclosure: One of the videos in the members-only section of the site is by the author of this news item.