Program Stages

We are scaling up the conference for an ever-increasing and diverse agile community. Following the sell-out of Agile 2007, we are expanding to a larger venue which can hold an audience of 1600+ attendees.

To facilitate this growth, Agile 2008 has adopted the metaphor of a music festival that provides multiple stages to attract audiences with common interests. The stages within our program are designed and organized by experts (acting as stage producers) who are truly passionate about their particular areas. Each stage will have a feel of a smaller, focused mini-conference whilst providing the conference attendee with a wide choice of stages to choose from. We believe this approach will allow the conference to scale, making it the biggest ever agile gathering!

Introducing the Stages!

Main Stage
Producer: David Hussman; Assistant Producer: Jutta Eckstein
The Main Stage will feature the big names, but it will also be a place for anyone innovating with agile methods. There will be people talking, people sharing, and possibly people performing. The Main Stage will spark the conference and feed the community. Read more

Research
Producer: Philippe Kruchten; Assistant Producer: Yael Dubinsky
The Agile Conference series has become the premier place for bringing to the international community the results of scientific research on agile software development processes and practices. We invite researchers and practitioners to contribute their part to the advance of our knowledge and understanding of these processes: agile methods, and the tools and practices that support them. Our objectives are to enrich our collective body of knowledge, influence the line of thought in the field, encourage debate, and bring innovative ideas, while applying rigorous scientific approaches. Read more

Breaking Acts
Producer: Laurent Bossavit; Assistant Producer: Eric Lefevre
Agile as it stands today is still a work in progress. For Agile software development to remain relevant, it must incorporate new ideas continuously. This stage is for speakers who bring a fresh and surprising look to aspects of Agile we thought familiar, and speakers interested in ideas that are relevant to Agile but not accepted yet as "mainstream". First-time speakers are particularly welcome. Read more

Questioning Agile
Producer: Jon Bach; Assistant Producer: Scott Barber
The Questioning Agile stage is dedicated to experience reports or points-of-view that challenge notions commonly associated with Agile. We’ll encourage speakers who have tried Agile processes on a project to find that they didn’t work or who consider themselves in a new camp known as "post-agile". This stage is for the critics, the questioners, the agile implementations that didn’t quite work out as advertized. Read more

Customers and Business Value
Producer: Kent McDonald; Assistant Producer: Greg Goodman
Agile approaches provide guidance not just in how to build software, but also in determining what to build and why it should be built. In other words, what is the right thing to build? This stage focuses on the values, principles, practices, and experiences surrounding what to build, what not to build, when to build it, and why it should be built. Read more

User Experience
Producer: Jeff Patton; Assistant Producer: Angela Martin
User experience refers to the overall experience a user has with a product, starting with the advertising and presenting of the brand, through the purchase to the use to the day-to-day feeling the user carries with them about the product. The quality of user experience can either magnify the value that software delivers, or ruin it. This stage focuses on the concerns of and practice of user experience work in Agile projects. Read more

Developer Jam
Producer: Jeff Nielsen; Assistant Producer: Kirk Knoernschild

There is no substitute for a group of programmers that can efficiently produce clean code and tests, keep the system integrated all the time, and evolve an architecture incrementally. The "developer jam" stage is about technical excellence. The audience will be in-the-trenches software developers, and the focus will be on improving the day-to-day skills that programmers need to succeed with agile. Read more

Tools for Agility
Producer: Rick Mugridge; Assistant Producer: Ron Jeffries
Intelligence-enhancing tools for agile software development can help us to think and to communicate in old and in new ways. They provide a conceptual "language" that can allow us to be expressive and creative. But tools can trap us into seeing the world in a limited way. They can encourage us to achieve the wrong things faster. And they can lead to our over compartmentalizing our tasks, teams, and minds. This stage is the place for discussions, interactions and demonstrations with automated tools that especially support agile software development. Read more

Committing to Quality
Producer: Steve Freeman; Assistant Producer: Keith Braithwaite

A distinguishing feature of Agile development is the commitment to maintaining high quality throughout the software lifecycle. We see this in practices such as continuous build, refactoring, and regular delivery. We believe that high Quality is cheaper in practice and that it improves team morale. But are we right? And what is Quality? This stage is about raising, maintaining, justifying, and (not least) recognizing Quality in software development. Read more

Legacy Systems
Producer: Brian Marick; Assistant Producer: Steve Freeman
Agile software development is hard when you're working on a code base that was developed by different techniques, by many hands, and over many years. This stage is about what it takes to succeed when faced with that challenge. Read more

Designing, Testing, and Thinking with Examples
Producer: Brian Marick; Assistant Producer: Adam Geras
For a long time, software people have thought abstraction was worthier than concreteness. Test-driven design has weakened that hierarchy somewhat, because programmers have learned how to build abstraction by reacting to a long succession of concrete examples (tests). This stage will reverse the hierarchy entirely: it won’t merely accept the need for examples, it will glory in them as one of the primary ways we learn, teach, communicate, test, design, code, and decide how to act in the world. The stage is therefore open to any kind of session that puts the concrete example front and center. Read more

Agile and Organizational Culture
Producer: Marc Evers; Assistant Producer: Linda Rising
Agile is not only about changing the way you work and changing the way you think - doing agile in a sustainable way requires changing principles and values. An agile initiative doesn’t take place in a vacuum, it has to interface with the existing organizational culture. It will influence the organizational context and the other way around. This stage provides a space for discussions, teaching, learning, and sharing experiences about agile and organizational culture. Read more

Distributed Agile
Producer: Naresh Jain; Assistant Producer: Jutta Eckstein
With software development going global, there are lots of organizations doing distributed development in various forms today. Over the last few years more and more of these organizations are trying light weight methods like Agile. While there are great advantages to Distributed Development, it comes with its own challenges. This stage will stress on practical applications and implications of distributed agile and will provide a platform for practitioners to share their distributed agile experiences and address other people’s concerns. Read more

Leadership and Teams
Producer: Johanna Rothman; Assistant Producer: Mike Griffiths
Have you noticed patterns or anti-patterns of leadership or teams in agile (or not yet agile) organizations? Do you have tips, tricks, tools of the trade for leaders or teams at any level in the organization? Do you have a message for leaders or teams in organizations? If so, we want to hear from you. Read more

Learning and Education
Producer: Brian Hanks; Assistant Producer: Robin Dymond
What are effective ways to teach and learn Agile Practices? The objective of this stage is to explore answers to that question. This stage provides a forum for industry practitioners and academics to learn from each other. How is Agile used in industry, and what can educators learn from this? What Agile practices should students be exposed to? Can teaching techniques used in the classroom be applied in the workplace? Read more

Live Aid
Producer: Bob Payne; Assistant Producer: Matt Scilipoti
The Live Aid stage provides the opportunity to observe and participate in a live agile project. This project will develop features for an open source project that will benefit a specific Not For Profit organization. A representative of this Not For Profit will be on site to act as the customer for this project. This lab allows participants to experience an Agile project with a Real Customer and contribute to a cause with Real Impact. Read more

Open Jam
Producer: Esther Derby; Assistant Producer: Tamara Sulaiman
The regular program presents a wide range of presentations and experiential sessions. The Open Jam stage is a place to share questions and quandaries, talk to the experts, demonstrate software and techniques, and experiment with emerging Agile practices and ideas. Read more

Chansons Françaises
Producer: Emmanuel Gaillot; Assistant Producer: J. B. Rainsberger
Pour certains en fait assister à une conférence internationale reste intimidant. Cela ne devrait pas être le cas. "Chansons Françaises" proposera des activités spécifiques (comme des sessions en Français, l’assistance de traducteurs, des discussions en Français pour d’autres sessions animées en Anglais) destinées à attirer les francophones qui seraient restés chez eux sinon. "Chansons françaises" will provide sessions in French, translation assistance, and discussions in French following sessions that were run in English. Read more

Musik Masti
Producer: Naresh Jain; Assistant Producer: Henrik Kniberg
Around mid-May we will re-open the submission system to put in proposals for performance at the Muzik Masti stage. You can also propose to form a band by inviting people to perform with you during the reception. We would also like to see people forming Just-In-Time bands during the Jam session to perform during the icebreaker reception. Read more