Feb 2007 - An endeavor to share our excitement, experience (rather inexperience) and child like curiosity about the new toy - Agile Software Development Methodology with the community having similar interests gave birth to "The Agile NCR Conference" - small enough to accommodate the audience within the office premises...

March 8, 2008 - A mega conference - mega sponsors, mega speakers and mega audience, was organized with the view to share this experience with the community:
"Guys, this Agile Software Development Methodology really makes sense - We tried it in co-location mode, distributed mode, with and without time-lag, with 4 hour time lag as well as with 12 hour time lag. It seems to be the most common sense approach to software development. Check it out, its worth its salt."

People came-back with huge enthusiasm, energy, excitement and curious questions. It led us to organizing many more community events catering to different levels of maturity in AGile - from Agile Awareness Workshops to advanced discussions about specific challenges in Agile Adoption.

After practicing, experimenting, discussing, sharing, eating, drinking, living Agile for more than 2 years, we stood in the middle of 2009, with this question staring us in the face - "Are we, as a community, Agile enough to organize the Agile NCR Conference in an Agile way?" This meant no waterfall planning of 2 months, no extended reviews, no short listing of speakers. It just meant, a mature, pro-active community gets together, and self-organize the conference in 1 sprint - 2 weeks, flat!

I threw open the question to the community, and they shouted back - "YES, We are agile enough! Let's go for it..."

July 18, 2009 - Hotel Park Premier, Gurgaon (Two weeks down the line since the community gave a go-ahead for the conference): A few anxious moments, ensuring everything was in place - we had the projector up and running, but angle of projection made it less visible. Thanks to the prompt hotel staff, it was corrected quickly. The back-up projector was in place, the presentations backed-up on 2 thumb drives and the 4 back-up laptops were in place. The tags for people who had already registered were well laid out alphabetically and the registration desk was all set to handle spot-registrations. The printer thankfully stuck to his word and had delivered the banner at 6 am.

As decided, we were there 8am on the dot. To our surprise, the audience had already started turning up. Their excitement and energy was infectious.
By 8:30 I could see most of the seats taken.

Once things settled a bit, I took to the podium at 9 am to welcome our Agile community and set the day rolling.

Hedwig Baars, Head, R & D, Ericsson India, took over at 9:10 . He nicely introduced the world of Agile to the audience and took them on a roller-coaster journey of his experience with Agile adaptation.

Anurag Shrivastava, MD, Xebia India continued from where Hedwig left. He left the audience thinking, wondering and gasping at the questions he posed to them. I saw people (specially managers ) sat up with their thinking caps on. His presentation on "Towards Successful Projects" was captivating.
After all the food for thought Anurag had provided, we felt it was best to have some food for our empty bellies. We broke for tea.

We were excited because so far we were bang on schedule - "Can we make it? The first ever conference to start on time and more importantly end on time?" I wondered excitedly.

The speakers kindly agreed to wrap up when we flash the "10 minutes remaining" board during their presentations and the audience was hugely cooperative when it came to parking their questions at the "Parking Lot" in favor of staying on schedule. We got a cushion of around 3 to 4 questions after each session.

My count down timer shouted, it was time to request the audience to be back on their seats. Before we knew it, people were settled and ready for the next session. Hedwig took it from there on. He discussed his experience with "Ericsson India and Agile Ways of Working."

This was followed by a session on "Agile Project Management" by Mayank Gupta from GlobalLogic. Mayank is well known for his pro-activeness in Agile Community Events.

By the time Mayank wrapped up the interesting discussion that people had started with each other, it was time for lunch.

Over the lunch I got an opportunity to involve in some pretty engrossing discussions with people from various firms at different levels of Agile adoption, and the challenges thereof.

I liked the paneer dish, but not the oil-slick on the gravy. I was finally able to resist the tempting sweets corner and get back on the podium to welcome our next speaker - Ravichandran JV, from JK Technosoft. Ravi's presentation discussed the much-talked about concern regarding Agile - "ROI with Agile (Converting Risk to Return on Investment)".

There's a very common notion, or rather misconception, when it comes to maintenance projects - "Agile is not applicable to maintenance projects".
Shrikant Vashishtha, a Principal Consultant with Xebia, took on this question and demonstrated how we can successfully use Agile Software Development Methodology for "Agile Maintenance".

After our next tea break, it was now our turn to take to the stage... A day long event, north Indian summer... hot outside, air-cooled inside, a heavy lunch and 2 tea breaks... The chances were slim that the audience was still awake... But we were pleasantly surprised by their level of energies and applause as we declared our Agenda of presentation - "Effective Collaborative Programming." by Abhishek Agrawal, Senior Consultant & Knowledge Manager, Xebia along with Amit Sharma, Consultant and Agile Enthusiast, Xebia. The presentation talked about pair programming and more importantly distributed pair programming (also known as remote or virtual pair programming)

We finally wrapped up with an Open Space Technology session, where in people self-organized themselves into interesting groups discussing important matters.
Each group's host collected the points and presented the same to conclude the Open Space technology session.

As we thanked the speakers and the audience, I indicated the hotel staff that was waiting impatiently to collect their projector. Did we make it on time, did we stick to our word, did we keep our promise to the community? May be the last round of OpenSpace stretched a bit. With all the anxious questions in mind, I turned my wrist for my watch to face up and see me in the eye - It was 6:30 on the dot - the exact time, as promised to the community!

With a smile, we concluded the day.

See you next year @ Agile NCR 2010 Conference.


Agile NCR 2009 Links:
Photos | Presentations

Tags: Agile, Agile Awareness Workshop, agile case studies, distributed agile, Introduction to Agile, pair programming
Filed under Agile, Agile Maintenance, General, distributed agile, offshore | 7 Comments »