I have been working as a software consultant for more than 11 years. Because of that I am an eager supporter of lean principles and agile methods.
A familiar atmosphere characterized the fist day of the conference and many good speeches were given. To highlight a few of them:
- Jens Østergaard, Agile Development - gave an introduction to the agile manifesto and Scrum. (Jens was the one who certified me as a scrum master.)
- Jeff Sutherland, Patientkeeper - shared his experiences on hyperproductive and distributed Scrum teams, having team members in USA, Canada and Russia. Jeff Sutherland is a very convincing speaker with high credibility, since he has thorough hands on experience on the subject. He bloody created Scrum!
- Tom Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC - shared his experiences on a Scrum implementation filled with all sorts of obstacles in an organisation full of problems. They have drawn some valuable experiences that he presented in an excellent way.
- Boris Gloger, SPRiNT iT - shared his knowledge and experiences on the subject of Retrospectives.
- Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC - talked about agile contracts and why fixed price contracts should be avoided. I have discussed the same subject in a previous article, so it was very interesting when Mary took the subject even further and shared her knowledge about the Toyota way of doing this.
I will not participate on day 2, which is a full day tutorial on implementing lean principles.