SPA 2006, Tuesday and Wednesday

Tuesday

Norm Kerth’s keynote looking back on 5 years of Retrospectives wasn’t surprising if you read the book or performed retrospectives. Many (most?) people in the audience have done or want to do retrospectives. Norm gave a great overview of Retrospectives and the results he and other retrospective facilitators have achieved. Performing retrospectives is good for the health of your team, the results of your project and your career. A simple and effective way to improve your process is the only thing you really need in your process. Everything else you need, will be introduced if and when you need.

An interesting and fun session about Product Managers. In the workshop we looked back at experiences with Product Managers. From these experiences, we determined what a product manager needs to do and what qualities we’re looking for. It is a very difficult job, juggling all those (possibly conflicting) demands.

Clarke Ching just wrote a blog entry about a book on “Agile Product Development”. Maybe worth checking out.

After a nice walk in very windy St Neots, off to Richard Mitchell’s session on modeling with views. Instead of making one big domain model, Richard creates smaller models, specifically for one (type of) domain specialist. He can then combine them in one, consistent model.

We talked a bit more about the theory of constraints and its application in software development. And then it’s time for the traditional last evening diversion. This year we had a wine and cheese tasting. Most people seemed to prefer the wine to last year’s Belgian beer. Apparently, Geuze Lambic is an acquired taste…

Wednesday

First, get some work done: handle registrations for Agile Open. If you want to attend, don’t wait to long to register, because we limit the number of participants to 40.

I’m looking forward to Dave Thomas’ keynote. “Cargo Cults and Angry Monkeys” sounds very interesting.

Read more at http://www.spaconference.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl