Agile Development and Product Management

Agile Product Management and a lively talk about modern software development by Alistair Cockburn were the themes of the day. The day started off with a hotel breakfast buffet at 6:30. One thing I rarely miss when I travel is a good breakfast to start the day.

My speaking opportunity was, um, unique. Basically a bunch of stages set up around all the food. Oh, and also starting at 7:45 AM. I was able to rush through my presentation and still answer a few questions.

Next was the keynote speaker, Alistair Cockburn. He arrived in dramatic fashion with a bag pipe player leading him onto to the stage, then quickly started reciting a famous passage from Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar, changing key words from the original play to a more "Agile" flavour. Quite entertaining really. He then proceeded to talk about the main pillars of Agile, interjecting personal experiences and anecdotes. Everyone seemed quite engaged with his talk and gave him a great ovation when he was finished.

We attended the Product Manager/Product Owner Dilemma session presented by Rich Mironov. Very entertaining presenter who identified the key differences between Product Owners and Product Managers. Key takeaways for me were 1) that the overlap between the Agile community and Product Management was very small; 2) Agile development is a big part of business agility; and 3) the Product Owner role adds 40-60% more work than the traditional PM role. Overall a good presentation that concluded with a spirited Q&A discussion.

Good start to the Agile 2009 show… seems bigger than last year and well organized so far.

Interesting, we're seeing lots of people from safety-critical shops - medical devices, telecom, military & aerospace, etc. Anecdotally seems like a big change from last year. Todd attended an Agile in safety critical talk that was a good general overview of why Agile is better than traditional development methods for these shops, but lacked specifics on how, why, etc. There's an FDA validation & agile presentation later in the week which will present an actual medical device case study - that should offer more specifics on how to reconcile the process-heavy, documentation-centric approach to a typical regulated environment with Agile.

We also attended Effective Code Reviews in Agile Teams.  Good overview from the Spartez team.  Originally thought this might be vendor specific (Mark's blog also touched on this) as Spartez does lots of work for Atlassian Crucible but overall it was a good overview even though all the demos were with Crucible.  Despite that, they kept it vendor neutral and described the challenges of adopting code reviews and the keys to success.


They reviewed a bunch of common code review misconceptions and pitfalls.  Namely that people see this as a frantic bug hunt and that it will find all bugs in your code.  Also many developers see this as a "big brother" tool where metrics including every comment will be tracked. For managers, they warned not to expect a clear picture that code reviews have saved you x amount of time.  Well that would be nice. ;)  In terms of how this fits in an Agile context there is definitely one clear message, everyone can join/review/invite/modify a code review.  It's all about the team (of course!) and about learning, not blaming. They see code reviews not as a tool-centric activity but basically a way to enhance communication or emphasize individuals and interactions, to use an Agile Manifesto term.