malvasia bianca

The first day of Agile 2006 is now more or less over. It was just a half-day, really: only afternoon talks, and I don’t think quite everybody is here.

I went to a couple of presentations. The first wasn’t too good: it was billed as talking about how agile had changed since the manifesto, but ended up having people talk/fill out cards about various aspects of their experience, with minimal analysis/insight, and overrunning its time box to boot. (I though agilists were supposed to be good about that?) The second was rather better: Scott Ambler talking about data he’d gathered about the penetration and effects of agile practices. Nice that somebody’s trying to gather data, and apparently doing a decent job (though it wouldn’t be too hard to find places to doubt the methodology); also nice that almost nobody thinks they’ve been hurt by adopting agile practices and most people think they’ve been helped.

There was an icebreaker. With some DDR pads; you’d think that, in a room full of geeks, some people would be drawn to video games, but that turns out to be the case. I don’t know how much of that is fear of dancing and how much of that is age. I also talked to Mary Poppendieck for half an hour or so, pumping her for information about lean. Most kind of her to spend the time; that’s the high part of my day.

The wifi in the areas where the conference is actually taking place is free; I’m using that now.

I also finally got around to making tar files of my unit test framework; the latest version should now always be available at http://unittest.red-bean.com/tar/unittest-latest.tar.gz. Yay.