Attened a „sermon“ about Agile & Scrum held at/by Advania at their HQ

Advania offers good day
Guest G. Gestsson, CEO Advania
Quick into about Advania, it was even pretty good for a marketing introduction, nice slides and only 5 minutes 😉

AgileNetið in Brief
Lísa Jóhanna Ævarsdóttir, PR for Agile-netið
In reaaly brief she told about Agilenetið that is the network of companies in Iceland that met regularly through „sceince“ trips to the companies and have regular Open Spaces to talk about Agile stuff. Today there are only 22 companies (up from 10 in 2010) and there seem to be many more that are going Agile and should be part of this network.

English is Agile software development – what happens next?
Baldur Kristjánsson, Advania
Scrum/Agile introduction to ensure that everybody was up to speed since there were many attendees that aren’t familiar with Agile. Also went over some examples he had worked on and the history of Agile in Iceland.

Valitor, how Agile has revolutionized working methods of the company
Daníel Máni Jónsson, head of software development at Valitor
He had nice slides in Prezi, setup as a Scrum wall with all the tickes on the board being post-it stickers that were the „slides“ he went through. Talked about how they have successfully moved the whole company into Scrum and some things they were trying out.

Development of a new constitution with Agile methods
Vilhjálmur Þorsteinsson, the Constitutional Assembly member (and chairman at CCP)
It was really enlightening to see that they did use iterative methods to create the new proposal and that they only had about 3 months to get the job done. I quickly recognized slides from Finnur Pálmi and Vilhjámur did mention that the cool slides were from Finnur 😉 Rather impressing how they planned & did the work with good control on meetings, breaking the 25 members into 3 groups that had different meeting during the week and I think they did a pretty good job considering the time limit and that they had to start from scratch.

Agile2 – not just for software projects
Gunnar Sigurjónsson, consultant at Advania
He went over some new ideas in Agile and where it might be heading and what people are trying out. Maybe I was just tired but I didn’t feel that this lecture was enough to the point and didn’t quite hold my attention 😐

The invite might still be up at
http://www.advania.is/um-advania/atburdir/frett/2012/10/26/Fostudagsmessa-um-Agile-og-Scrum/
and then the slides should appear in the not so distant future 😉

And a few points I jotted down:

• Electronic walls – remarkable that people in software development most often don’t use software to keep track of the work…that should say a thing or two about software and software development 😉
• Ownership is key…be it Scrum, or your own methods you wan’t to make them your own…
• What is Agile – there are a lot of people who just take Scrum as Agile and somehow the „commandments“ and principles of Agile seem to get lost…maybe that’s ok…?
• Scrum is a tool – just like a spoon is a great tool, but when eating meat you might wan’t something else to work with 😉
• What’s missing in Kanban – list up the things it needs to function better…
• Agile in other places that software development – well it comes from manifacturing/lean…and yes…there are a lot of points there I didn’t write down…keeping them unorganised in my head for now 😉