Gojko Adzic

The official programme of Agile 2008 conference just ended. With about 2000 attendees, 400 presenters and about thirty concurrent sessions running at any given time, this was by far the largest software development conference I ever attended. Continue Reading »

Robert C. Martin delivered a very powerful speech yesterday at the Agile 2008 conference, titled Quintessence. Criticising software developers for not acting as professionals, he suggested adding a fifth principle to the Agile manifesto. Continue Reading »

Marry Poppendieck talked today at Agile 2008 about compensation schemes, attacking the traditional model of bonuses and appraisals. Pointing out that a traditional bonus system undermines teamwork and implies that most people will not do their best without additional financial incentives, she suggested focusing on more immediate and non-financial motivation techniques. Continue Reading »

During his Executable User Stories with RSpec and BDD session at Agile 2008 today,
Aslak Hellesøy presented Cucumber, a new rewrite of RSpec Story Runner. According to Aslak, Cucumber is easier to use than the previous Story Runner. It also supports internationalisation, executing from the command line or rake, has colour coding and better error reporting. Continue Reading »

James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, gave a keynote speech today at the first day of Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. His talk was about how to harness the collective intelligence better and what conditions have to be met for teams to be more intelligent than any single individual in the team. Continue Reading »