Duncan Pierce duncanpierce.org

If you’re thinking of submitting a session for XPDay, do it now! The final day for submissions is Tuesday 31st July.

Should you submit a session? We encourage you to share your ideas, knowledge and questions. Even if it’s incomplete; even if it’s bad news; even if it’s just a question, the programme committee can help you shape it into a session that will teach you as much as your audience. And if your session is accepted your place at XPDay 2007 is free.

Andy Moorley has photographed the posters produced by participants at the SPA 2007 cognitive bias workshop. I’ve rotated and cropped them and uploaded them.

There’s been an information vacuum surrounding agile adoption for a long time now. Thankfully, books and other resources are starting to emerge. I’ve just been asked to provide some links on agile adoption and it seems like they might be of some use to the world at large so I’m posting them.

I’ve just read Chris Clarke’s post “How can an application or language be agile?”

I predicted a few years ago “agile” would follow “object-oriented” into the buzzword lexicon, right around when Microsoft started using the word. What happened with OO is that for a while everything was object-oriented. In some ways it was a step forward – lots of people got to hear about it and started trying to do it – but the meaning got so watered down that in the end there are a lot of lessons that most people haven’t really internalized. Hence we get some second-wave attempts to reconnect to the root concepts like Eric Evans’ book “Domain-Driven Design”.

Sun have finally started selling the Sun SPOT to US customers. I worked on this project until mid-2006 and I must admit I’m proud others will have a chance to use these devices. I’d like to highlight some of the great features of these devices, and some of the best things about being on this project.

• Do you want answers?
• Do you have a half-baked idea that things could be better?
• Have you been living in “interesting times”?
• Do you know something we don’t?

The XPDay 2007 call for sessions is open and we encourage you to share your ideas, knowledge and questions. Even if it’s incomplete; even if it’s bad news; even if it’s just a question, the programme committee can help you shape it into a session that will teach you as much as your audience.

If your session is accepted your place at XPDay 2007 is free.

Agile certification is currently a hot topic. Among the assorted April Fool’s pranks was this agile certification site. I captured some screen shots in case the site goes away.

My entries for the SPA 2007 competition. Update I won a bottle of wine!

I ran the first cognitive bias workshop at SPA 2007 yesterday. It went reasonably well but as I expected it was difficult for participants to review and use the list of cognitive biases I provided.

The trend towards shorter iterations, while being a good demonstrator of increasing development capability, also tends to rob planners of an opportunity to step back from project minutiae.