XP Days Benelux, second day

21 November 2008

The bed I slept in was very good. It had become very cold in my room and the heating didn’t work. Took a hot shower and dressed. I should have gotten my breakfast (package) at my room but it never arrived. There was no personnel and no one answered the phone. So no breakfast. I went down to wait for the cab and found out that the baker left my breakfast on the doorstep of the hotel in a cardboard box (in the rain!). The taxi was right on time. So I took the fruit drink and left for the second day of the XP day’s conference.

We started out with an opening plenary, where the sessions were introduced in 30 sec. The introduction made me change my mind and I rearranged my choices. Only ‘Agile and SOA’ and ‘resistance to change’ stayed on my list. Two topics at this time in life that interest me a lot.

I attended ‘introducing scrum in a large organization‘ by Didier and Jan. This session started out and finished with commercials for the company’s products. In between they explained the start of the project as usual: budget, time and goal. Then explained how they first introduced XP. This was Agile in the small, and they added metrics and retrospectives and some more Agile instruments and explained ways they extended the whole approach. It was interesting enough to let the law of two feet go by. I could distil some pointers of things that were meant to introduce Agile in the large… Perhaps they should read Jutta Eckstein’s book. Their approach was instrumental and technical and we understood what issues were left unaddressed.

The second session was about Agile and SOA. For this session I was well prepared. Unfortunately again a very technical architectural view. It focused on a ‘utilities departments’ management problems. The presenters was throwing threee letter acronyms at us. 3 or 4 times I tried to take de discussion to another level by asking tempting questions but it didn’t help so I left the session after approximately 15 minutes. Very disappointing.

After lunch I attended the session named ‘Overcoming resistance to change‘ by Dave and Lasse. This is one other of my ‘pet’ topics. It was a very enlightning session and there were some good hints and tips on approaches to overcome resistance to change. Some of which I wouldn’t like to practice, but still. (e.g. manipulate, question someone’s credibility;)

The last session I attended ‘Hey scrum master! Let the team decide‘. This was a very interactive session that starting with a lot of humor. We explored the possibility of letting the team decide whether to do retrospectives or not and to give them room to fail. To facilitate this we looked for possibilities and attitudes the scrum master would have to master. I loved this session.

In the closing session prizes were awarded to the teams (our team too). The awards were: a license to some IDE and each a bottle of Belgium beer. After that drinks were served by courtesy of one of the sponsors. Unfortunately, I had to leave because my taxicab would arrive at 6 o clock to take me to the train station again. Heading home in the train I wrote this second report of XP days. I am certainly going to attend a XP day’s conference again! Met some beautiful, knowledgeable and very friendly people again and spoke to old and new friends.