Agile Bench » agile2009 http://agilebench.com/blog Get the Story Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:56:20 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Is the agile community inclusive? http://agilebench.com/blog/2009/08/26/is-the-agile-community-inclusive/ http://agilebench.com/blog/2009/08/26/is-the-agile-community-inclusive/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:26:33 +0000 mark http://agilebench.com/blog/?p=41 Agile 2009 is huge. There are 1350 people with 23 streams of talks across 2 buildings, which is pretty crazy. It is impossible to get across the entire line-up of talks so you have to be selective. Thankfully the sessions are divided by experience, persona and some more general groupings.

The persona divisions are pretty interesting. There are the traditional agile personas such as software developers (experience and new to agile), testers and business analysts. These sessions are focused on making you better at your skill-set within an agile environment. The agile community, and more generally, people new to agile, focus a lot on becoming more proficient in their current domain. There are great resources on pair programming, refactoring, test-driven design, mocking and stubbing and basic project management around and have been for a while.

Software development is a microcosm of product development and to build great products you need (gasp) more than just software developers, testers and analysts. The UX, product management and leadership (as opposed to management) communities are starting to be represented more equitably, which is a good thing for the Agile community. When these communities collaborate together we build better products which is something we all value.

With the establishment of the “PMI Agile Community of Practice” http://ow.ly/llUl project managers are moving closer to the agile community that will be good for both communities.

But there are a few major personas missing. On the delivery side, what happened to the system and database administrators? On the organizational side where are the accountants?

The fact that the Agile community is becoming more inclusive of other disciplines is great. But has it gone far enough?

What do you think?

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