Agile 2006
The weather in Minneapolis was warm this year, and so was figuratively speaking the Agile 2006 Conference, which had all sorts of interesting discussions going on anywhere - lobbies, dining rooms, sessions. I felt at home for its informality, and definitely will come back next year.
While being a newbie to the gathering, I have been working with agile software development since 1999 when I was first introduced to the topic by Bill Addington, whose last job at Compaq was as a software development quality and methodologies guru.
Aside from MSF (which to me was inexplicably absent from the manifesto meeting in 2000), my first book on agile was Adaptive Software Development by Jim Highsmith, then Xtreme Programming Explained (first edition) by Kent Beck, followed by Java Modelling in Color, a beautiful book by Coad, Lefebvre and DeLuca, which introduced FDD.
So while at the conference it was a pleasure to meet in person several luminaries who have been the backbone of the Agile movement.
The first one was Alistair Cockburn [pronounced 'co-burn']. We had a chance of chatting for a few minutes after his introductory presention on Agile Software Development in general, and Crystal Clear in detail. My favorite book of his though is Writing Effective Use Cases.
We talked about the origin of the name "Agile" for the manifesto, with a few interesting points I will bring back later.
Alistair Cockburn in a display of positive agile energy while talking to a conference attendee
