10 years after we wrote the agile manifesto, we authors were invited to a special event during the Agile 2011 conference to celebrate the anniversary. Fifteen of the seventeen authors came along and we ran a park bench panel answering questions and comments from the audience. I think we were all surprised by how good it was to meet again and how easily we fell back into a comfortable collaboration and discussion. Our discussion included some background to the writing of the manifesto, looking at things over the last decade that we were pleased and unhappy with, future developments in agile, and the relationship between agile and lean.

In late June over a hundred people gathered on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia to take part in the XP2000 conference to discuss Extreme Programming (XP) and other flexible methodologies.

At the end of May 2002, the XP community once again descended on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. In this article I look at the plenary speeches from Ken Schwaber, David Parnas, Enrico Zaninotto, Bill Wake, and the Standish Group's Jim Johnson. They lead me into some thoughts on the essence of agile development, the role of mathematical specifications, the complexity of irreversibility, metaphor, and the best way to drastically cut software costs.

As XP and other Agile methods gain popularity, questions are beginning to surface regarding how to scale XP beyond teams of 10-12 people. In mid February 2003 a workshop dedicated to the subject was held in Banff Alberta Canada. In this article we report on the keynote speeches from Ken Schwaber, and Martin Fowler, as well as other leading practitioners.

The OOPSLA 2007 conference occurred on the 20th anniversary of Fred Brooks's famous paper “No Silver Bullet”. So to mark this, we had a retrospective panel, including the Mr Brooks. I was lucky enough to be invited on the panel, although I doubt they expected quite the contribution I ended up making.

Scattered impressions from my recent trip to Australia for the Agile Australia conference.

Last week I attended the Agile 2010 conference in Orlando. Agile 20xx is the major US agile-oriented conference whose roots go back to XP Universe and the Agile Development Conference. I've not been a regular attender of the main agile conferences, but I did go last year as well. Rather than make an attempt at a consolidated description, here are a few scattered impressions.

Last weekend I attended the Alt.NET conference. It was the first named gathering of a group of people I've been watching on the blogosphere for quite a long time. A group of long-time users of Microsoft technologies who feel that their development philosophy has been getting out of sync with the perceived orthodoxy from Redmond. While some have considered moving away this group is keen to stay and try to influence the Microsoft world.

This is an embarrassingly brief report of what has turned into my favorite conference. Sadly a clash with other business meant that I could only spend a day in Aarhus. JAOO continues to be a great conference, although I'm hard put to say why. Somehow it manages to retain the feel of a small conference while staying fresh and broad.

I've been attending OOPSLA for over a decade. It's become the place where I catch up with lots of friends and find out what they've been doing lately, and try to get a sense of where the OO community is going.

OOPSLA again, lots of conference and all sorts of ideas. It's impossible to do a proper write-up of this conference - there's too much for any one human to attend, let alone take in. So these are scattered thoughts.

Open Space is an approach to help you put together self-organizing conferences. I was first introduced to it by Norm Kerth in 1997 and have since seen it used, and used it myself, many times. It seems to work well in small scales, groups of a dozen or two people, and at larger scales of one or two hundred. I've seen it for periods of one to three days. I'll describe it with variations I have seen: Crested Butte is a small annual workshop of around 20 people, Agile Universe 2002 had about 100 or so at the conference with Open Space in one track (they've continued to do this since, but I've not been able to get there), foocamp did this with a couple of hundred people. The technique was developed by Harrison Owen and is well described in his book.

I don't go to as many conferences as I used to, but the advantage of that is that I have time to go to ones that take my fancy. I've long had a particular fondness for the Ruby community, so I turned up as an attendee at this year's RailsConf.

goto (formerly known as JAOO) has long been a favorite conference of mine. They've done a great job over the years of keeping a high standard of content combined with an efficient and friendly organization. So while my over-consumption of conferences has generally led to conference-phobia, I still feel a sense of pleasant anticipation when heading off for the somewhat complicated trip to Aarhus.

The last couple of months have been heavy on the travel (towards the end of it I calculated that I'd spent 40 out of the last 44 days on the road) which is why my website has been quiet. Now I'm back home again and can reflect on some of it - and the goto conference is always full of things to reflect on.