CAS 2011 retrospective

This is my own retrospective about Agile Spain 2011 conference, which I attended last week.

Start doing

I couldn’t agree more with @eamodeorubio when he says that we should give the event a broader scope. I’m trying to help by writing this post only in English Smile. For example, we got near zero value from @jbrains during the round table because of the language. Start doing sessions in English and inviting international speakers! I gave a session at Agile Portugal conference a few months ago, and I was amazed to see how almost all the communication was carried out in English. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against Spanish in any way, but we’re losing lots of opportunities for learning, networking and knowing new people by restricting almost all the conference to one language.

More of

More of these awesome sessions! Unfortunately I missed a lot of the program, but I enjoyed specially the keynotes, the Kanban sessions by Mr. Maeda, and to see how @jgomezz is helping to grow up a great team at his organization.

Keep doing

Please keep with that awesome work from the organization people! I’ve been doing that sort of organization work lately for www.scrumweek.com, and now I can understand how difficult is to take into account all these little details that arise when you have to deal with lots of attendants, speakers, sponsors, etc. My warmest congratulations for them. Thank you to the sponsors as well, for making it possible the event to take place.

Less of

As @pepellou already said, I’d get rid of some philosophical concerns and futile discussions during sessions, retrospectives and the event in general. We’re doing software, let’s focus in that!

Stop doing

I know it’s hard to maintain attention on a Friday afternoon, but for all of these not attending the retrospective, I’d ask them to think twice when they call themselves agilists. It was sad to realize that less that a quarter of the conference attendants stayed there until the retrospective. The only positive outcome of so much people missing, was that there were more mojitos for the ones who stayed, thanks to Autentia. Maybe scheduling the round table later would have help to avoid these fugitives.

And speaking in a broader sense, I’d try to stop some arguments that are commonly carried out between code-centric and process-centric people. Both of them are needed in almost any development project, so I’d stop arguing and start collaborating!

About my session

I spoke about new approaches to several Scrum practices, using the Scrum Guide as direction. Here are the slides:

 

And here is the video which appears on slide 17, which is being fairly popular:

 

And the winner is…

I promised to give away a seat for free, for my upcoming Professional Scrum Foundations course at Scrumweek Barcelona 2011, to one of the attendants to my session.

I’ve been impressed about how Yolanda Dura and her team are struggling to succeed with Scrum and Agile, so the prize goes for her. I hope they’ll take a lot of advantage from it.

Talleres sobre ALM en CEIN (Pamplona)

En un par de días voy a estar impartiendo dos talleres en CEIN (Pamplona):

Si estás por la zona esos días y te interesan los temas, es posible que aún queden plazas libres.