Agile 2006 Initial Thoughts

I’ve always enjoyed those moments when you realize “Wow, why didn’t I do this sooner?!” These moments are usually accompanied by the feeling that you’ve found something that will help you to do things a lot easier or more effectively in the future. This was my initial reaction to my attending Agile 2006 in

Minneapolis.

The conference is well attended (a little over 1100 at current count.) The attendees, based on the limited sampling of my conversations, come from all backgrounds and organizations. Developers, managers, owners and testers are represented. As a case in point, at lunch I sat between an instructor from a university in Haifa, Israel that uses an agile approach in teaching and a manager for an organization in Orlando that helps document living languages that a currently not documented; projects with about a 35 year life cycle.

If you are a student of the game, and always looking at ways to get better at what you do, then I highly recommend attending these events on at least a semi-regular basis. It’s hard to tell what will happen when the conference attendance grows to thousands (in about two years based on past growth.) I doubt it will be the intimate gathering that some current attendees describe when talking about previous conferences. But it is agile, it will scale and it will adapt.