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Naresh Jain's Random Thoughts on Software Development and Adventure Sports
     
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Using ToC and JIT Practice to Coach Agile Teams

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

J B Rainsberger & Naresh Jain share their experience on coaching agile teams. They present:

  1. How to apply Theory of Constraint [ToC] to identify the bottlenecks or issues the teams are facing during their agile adoption?
  2. Once we identify the bottleneck, how we delivered knowledge and experience to the teams, just in time to apply that knowledge to eliminate the bottleneck, using the Just-In-Time practice concept?

This 90 mins workshop was presented at the Agile Mumbai 2010 and Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference.

Discovery and Delivery – David Hussman’s Video from Agile Bengaluru 2010 Conference

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

David Hussman’s Keynote at Agile Bengaluru 2010 Conference titled: “Discovery and Delivery – Redesigning Agility

David starts off saying “Agile communities know that the sooner they deliver a working product the sooner they can determine the value it provides. Yet while the ability to deliver frequently is valuable, if you don’t know where you are going, it is easy to iteratively not get there.”

In this talk David RI-examines the balance of discovery and delivery techniques in use by agile communities today. He specifically, discusses how can design thinking help agile communities discover deeper product value before iterative delivery begins. Also, after the first iteration, how can agile communities use design tools to keep the users alive and well and part of every story, acceptance tests, and iteration of development and delivery.

Agile India 2010 Conference: Quick Recap

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

The Agile Software Community of India (ASCI), (a registered society founded by a group of Agile enthusiasts and practitioners from companies all around India) has successfully organized yet another agile conference in India called ‘Agile India 2010’. For the first time in India, we had 4 Gordon Pask Award Winners at a single conference: David Hussman, Jeff Patton, J. B. Rainsberger and Naresh Jain. Also for the first time, ASCI organized a unique twin-city conference, where this 2-day event was held in Mumbai (Jan 16th and 17th) and in Bangalore (Jan 22nd and 23rd, 2010).

The Goal of the conference was to challenge the process dogma, provide food for thought for creative problem solving and help us take the art-of-software-development to the next level. This year, the focus of Agile India 2010 was on real Agile practitioners who’ve “been there, done that and wanted to explore the future of Agile.” Targeted at Agile enthusiasts, researchers and educators, Agile India 2010 offered an ideal platform for attendees to network and learn about the latest research and cutting-edge Agile industry practices directly from the experts through talks, hands-on technical sessions, workshops, competitions and tutorials.

The conference featured 26 recognized National and International speakers, over 250 enthusiastic participants from over 75 companies, 7 Keynote talks, 10 Workshops/Tutorials, 5 Product Demos, 7 Experience Report, 25+ Lightning talks and a thrilling Programming with the Stars competition.

Like every year the conference participants were gifted with a Conference T-Shirt and a carefully selected book as a souvenir. This year the participants had a choice between 3 books:

  • Apprenticeship Patterns
  • The Art of Lean Software Development
  • The Productive Programmer

ASCI is proud to partner with our sponsors, BNP Paribas, ThoughtWorks and Xebia and our Mumbai host Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management & Engineering to bring this conference to you. Our sponsors, also corporate members of ASCI, have been long-term supporters and promoters of Agile Software Development methods globally. A special thanks to Industrial Logic for providing the support to organize this event possible. Also a big thanks to our supporters, Directi, Binary Essentials and Agile Alliance.

Some of the highlights of Agile India 2010 included “Programming with the Stars” – a fun post-lunch segment each day where “ordinary” conference attendees paired with legendary developers from top companies around India, who have attained a high degree of mastery in Agile development. The duos perform live on stage in front of a panel of judges, David Hussman, J. B. Rainsberger and Jeff Patton. PWTS lived up to its expectations by being both entertaining and educational. Rajesh & Amit were rated as the best pair in Mumbai. While Bhavin and Mukesh won the best pair title in Bengaluru.

The conference also featured over 25 lightning talks where participants shared their thoughtful, unique idea about Agile in under 3 minutes.

Also this year the conference tried to be as environmental friendly as much as possible. Some of the steps taken at the conference were:

  • Skipped handing out printed material like conference program, printed handouts & slides (except for what the conference sponsor handed over).
  • Skipped handing over notepads & pens. Another big source of wastage. Very few people take notes and they usually carry their own.
  • Lunch and snacks were served in washable plates & steel spoons. Usually conferences use throwaway plates and plastic spoons.
  • For drinking tea, coffee & juice, we requested the conference participants to carry their own mugs & water bottles.
  • Conserving Electricity: We tried to switch off projectors and Air Conditioners when ever possible.

To back all of this, both locations had an enlightening talk from Captain Planet (aka Saurabh Arora) showing the effect of global warming and how we can take small steps everyday to avoid further worsening the situation.

Like every Agile India conference in the past, this conference left delegates coming away with new ideas on how to improve their software development process by applying Agile practices to development and delivery. All the conference slides are available from the conference program page on our site www.agileindia.org/agileindia2010.

Conferences could be lot more Greener

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Recently at the Agile Mumbai 2010 and Agile Bengaluru 2010 conference, we tried to make the conference as green (environment friendly) as possible. Following are the things we tried:

  • We did not hand over any conference program, printed hand-outs & slides or any other printed material (except for what the conference sponsor handed over). All this info is already available on our website. To make it convenient for the conference attendees, we took 3 large (A2 size) printout and stuck it outside each hall (track).
  • We also skipped handing over  notepads & pens. I my experience very few people use them. Also those who want to use it, it’s easy to carry a notepad and pen.
  • Lunch and snacks were served in washable plates & steel spoons. Usually conferences use throw-away plates and plastic spoons.
  • For drinking tea, coffee & juice, we requested the conference participants to carry their own mugs & water bottles. This did not work all that well. We had only 3 people carry their own mug. In future, we plan to hand out a mug to each participant. (For Bengaluru conference, since it was in a hotel, they took care of serving tea & coffee in porcelain cups. Water was served is proper washable glasses)
  • Conserving Electricity: We tried to switch off projectors and Air Conditioners when ever possible. This is an area of huge improvement. We need to find more interesting ways to conserve energy.
  • Originally we had planned to request the participants to return their lanyards so we could reuse it. This one fell through the cracks.

At both the conferences we had an enlightening talk from Captain Planet (aka Saurabh Arora) showing the effect of global warming and how we can take small steps everyday to avoid further worsening the situation.

Overall I think there are lot more things we can do to make the conference more environmental friendly.

What did you learn at Agile Mumbai and Agile Bengaluru 2010 Conference

Monday, January 25th, 2010

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