On Tuesday 25th April I attended ‘That Crazy Agile Thing‘ – a one day Agile conference I Leeds run by the organisers of Agile in Leeds and Agile Yorkshire, and hosted by Infinity Works.
When booking my ticket I had no idea what the conference would offer as the agenda was still to be announced. Following the release of the agenda I was pleased to see a good mix of talks on areas including pair and mob programming, servant leadership, DevOps and, the value of different types of testing. There were also two open space sessions scheduled.
Mark Matthews session on pair/mob programming and working solo was extremely interesting. It provided useful examples as to the benefits of pair/mob programming practices and the pitfalls of working solo. The overarching theme from the talk considered how to get the best from everyone, and how pairing/mobbing increased knowledge transfer, helped to standardise the code base and helped to reduce defects.
Sarah Glanville led the second talk of the day on servant leadership, highlighting some of the traits of a servant leader. As a Scrum Master I was able to relate to the traits described and consider how I dealt with those situations. The next step that I need to take is to identify how my team believe that I deal with those situations to help highlight areas where I could improve further.
Andy Burgin provided a history of DevOps at Sky Bet, identifying how the organisation has changed/evolved in recent years. Having worked at Sky Bet, I was aware of the progress that had been made I this area, with members of the DevOps team being embedded into delivery teams and the benefits that this provides.
Melissa Howe provided an overview of feedback looks in Agile deliveries before look at the types of test at each end of the spectrum, providing examples of the types of tests that her team had created.
Due to being ahead of time at the Open Space sessions, and in true Agile fashion, it was possible for the organisers to re-plan and hold three 45 minute sessions rather than two 1 hours sessions. I attended and contributed to sessions on scaling Agile and Agile Tools, with other sessions including topics such as Scrum Master as a shared role, Scrum Master v’s Agile Coach, dealing with uncertainty and blame, shame and punishment. I also facilitated a session on working with a distributed team or offshore model, the problems that can be faced and the ways that the impact of these issues can be minimised. I will be writing a further blog post on this subject in the coming weeks using the output from this session.
This was possibly the first Agile conference to be held in Leeds and I was glad to be a part of it. I’m already looking forward to next year.