Exoftware agile conference

In July I was lucky enough to get to an agile event arranged by exoftware. The event hosted in London was my first opportunity to hear two very significant players in the agile movement speak.

The first speaker was Kent Beck talking about test driven development and a concept that he termed software health. As a software engineer first and formost I am particularly interest in any approach that claims to improve quality. Kent was claiming more that this.

The term software health covered, in addition to quality, attributes such as flexibility to change, resiliance against regression and maintainability.

The second speaker was Mary Poppendiek. This was my first exposure to “Lean” thinking. Lean seems to me to underpin agile. Lean is a set of guiding principles that originated in the late 1970’s in the development of the Toyota Production System. Since then the same ideas have been rolled into many manufacturing businesses and also other areas such as logistics. Mary has taken these ideals and applied a software spin. After hearing what Mary had to say I went and bought her book and would recommend it to anyone interested in agile.