XP Day Suisse 2009 – Retrospective (version anglaise)

What went well?

• Present a session in French with Portia.
• Running and walking in the Jardin Botanique, along the lake and in the old town.
• Drawing, cutting, making placards with bits of string and paper to prepare the “presentation” and games the night before the conference.
• Great organisation by the Swiss team.
• Dominic Williams offers us the red or the blue pill, weaving philosphy and methodology together. Vive le développement hédoniste!
• Doing an instant retro at the end of the session to take participants’ feedback into account. Not just talking about Agile Values, but applying them.
• A great night out at “Les oubliettes” in restaurant “Les armuriers” with raclette, cheese fondue, cool white wine and great conversations ranging from “the relationship between Plato and class-based object oriented languages” to “the (lack of) style of conference goodies bags”.
• Meeting old and new acquaintances from Belgium, France and Switzerland.

What went wrong?

• We didn’t do a full tryout of the session before the conference, so we weren’t sure about the timing. We removed some explanations because we were afraid of going over our 60 min timebox. In the end the session went faster than expected. We could have taken the time to explain each item more.
• The session was a bit crowded because more participants than expected came to our session. Most of the games scaled well, though.
• We rushed the start of the session and didn’t do a proper introduction, which left many people wondering “who are they? Where do they come from?” Answer: Portia and Pascal from London and Brussels.

Puzzles

• What is the state of agility in Switzerland? We know some companies (like Hortis) have been applying it for some time. Most participants seemed to be new to agile.

Learned

• Tryout! Tryout! Tryout a new session!
• Philosophy can be fun and useful.
• The Erlang session brought back lots of student memories: CSP, Lisp, Prolog, FP,….