My learnings from AgileTour 2009

94 people gathered for the first AgileTour stop in the suburbs of Philadelphia. A good turn out for a mini 4 hours conference! Ravi and I welcomed the attendees and gave a little intro about the conference and the speakers. After that, I spent most of my time in the Open Jam.

Agile assessments

We commented on the recent efforts to assess agility.

Bob Martin, Ron Jeffries, Chet Hendrickson, Brian Marick and Jim Shore are working on a scrum certified developer program.

But wait! Ken Schwaber and Microsoft are working on another scrum certified developer program.

Joshua Kerievsky started a mailing list to study more alternative assessments.

A big surprise for me was learning more about Ken Schwaber’s and Microsoft alliance. Their scrum developer certification is not language agnostic. I am not sure of the value of being a .NET scrum certified developer. It looks like they are matching practices like Continuous Integration or TDD to a specific Microsoft tool. I am not sure how this is valuable for the industry. As a side joke, I look forward to the MS pairing tool. That is, if pairing gets into their “approved list of practices”.

Certifications

We talked about the evilness of the scrum certification scheme and the false sense of thinking that when you are certified, there is no need for you to study more about the topic.

We tend to blame certifications but is it maybe an organization or people problem? If we look at certification as the minimum basic knowledge to perform a job, why assuming that basic is enough? Basic barely makes the cut.

Somebody made the point that Scrum is sold as a “silver bullet”, an all-in-1-box solution. Organizations or teams are not encouraged to look outside of scrum because they are told that scrum will solve all their needs.

I agree with that, but it does not matter what methodology you use if you (and your organization) aren’t continuously learning?

Forget scrum, look at the technical field. How many of us (programmers) learn a new language every year? Let me lower the bar: How many of us are somewhat comfortable in more than 1 programming language?

Since it seems impossible to avoid the birth of a scrum developer certification, I am embracing it. I hope that my company will jump all over it and mandates for all of us to become certified.

If it takes a piece of paper to make my life easier, I am all for it. Not having to argue about the benefits of TDD, pairing, frequent checkins everyday is a welcome change. I don’t expect a big change overnight, but at least, it will be a starting point.

Wrap up

I got a lot of energy out of this conference. It was nice to see old friends and make new ones. I look forward to what we can do next with Agile Philly. We have plenty of new ideas.