On Thursday 29th April 2010, I attended the above.  As well as a number of government speakers, Ivar Jacobson and Scott Ambler gave keynotes on practices and agile at scale respectively.

Software Engineering Practices

I’ve heard this talk many times.  The bottom-line is that Ivar believes processes such as RUP, SCRUM and XP should be, and can be using a pretty geeky (that’s process geeky) meta-model, broken down into common practices so they can be compared and contrasted.  From the practices, one can compose a bespoke process ideally suited to a project and organisation’s needs.  Practices essentially become the primary focus as opposed to the process.  For examples of practices, see the Ivar Jacobson International site.

Agile at Scale

Scott kicked off with the statement that “all project managers are liars”.  This provocative statement was used to make the point that fixed-price contracts are immoral but the Project Management professional does nothing about this.  It’s a really broken part of our industry that needs fixing but there’s little incentive to fix it by the directly interested parties.  Scott then went on to talk about the scaling factors you need to consider when adopting agile practices – much of this is covered on Scott’s website.

It was a great event for us primarily as a sales vehicle.  Stuart gave a short talk touching on what we do.  As a result of our attendance we’re now talking to several new clients in the space in which we currently work.