Agile camp of strict regime or impressions of AgileCamp 2011 in Samara

What will happen if you collect a bunch of people, give them lego, tangerines, stickers, felt-tip pens? Mess? May be. But if you knead it all on agile, it can be very interesting. That is exactly what happened at the last AgileCamp in Samara. Details under the cut.



We should start with the fact that this was the first conference of this level, when I was able to look at everything from the inside, because I had a certain attitude towards the organization. So, from the inside is still steeper than the outside! But let's get down to business.

Day One: Agile and Lego, mandarins, stickers, felt-tip pens.

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In parallel, there were two streams - product design (engineering practice section) and product development (design, modeling and prototyping section). I wanted to break at least into 3 parts: in parts for each section and one more part had to carry out games and communicate.

On the engineering section, they burned Nikolai Alimenkov and Alexey Solntsev with the support of Anton Katkov , Dmitry Panshin (the .NET part) and Andrey Stepanov (the PHP part). Impressions of the guys from XP Injection can be read here . For those who did not know these practices, this section was just like manna from heaven, and those who knew it were just useful to clean up the head sometimes. From the side, the people who visited their training looked like scuba divers - a short break for a sip of coffee and again immersion in the wilds of code.



And behind the wall was no less interesting. The first training was conducted by Alexei Krivitsky in the company of Nikita Filippov and Dmitry Lobasev , which clearly demonstrated the basic principles and problems encountered in the management of the enterprise scrum. In the course went Lego, and which was in the shortest possible time built 4 pretty city. Excellent training, be sure to take note. I also managed to stay moderately intractable and fastidious product owner =) Lesha's impressions can also be read in his blog .



The baton was picked up by Dmitry Layer , who showed how agile games can be used to develop a product concept. He conducted the Product Box and Canvas Vision - great games in which it’s better to take part once than to hear a hundred times. The result is very visual and allows you to move from a dead center quickly enough.



The logical chain of prototyping was continued by Nikita with an excellent technique for collecting the demand - Story mapping . I think for the first time the Holiday Inn walls were densely covered with layers of paper, covered with markers and pasted over with the same stickers. I highly recommend using this technique on new projects, as it also allows you to get off the ground and understand where to go. It is better to call on this event not only the development team, but also people from the outside, it should be very cool.



Before the coffee break was another training from Maxim Gaponov . Unfortunately, I missed it because I actively advertised the Gamestorming book in the corridor : A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers . But going back to the training, I want to say that Bill Buxton was very interested in early prototyping that year at 404 fest. So, this is a very necessary thing to identify the possibility of glitches and fakapov in the interface at an early stage.

After the break, I was finally able to recruit people to one of my favorite agile games - Ball Point Game , which can be easily rewritten from the Orange Point Game. Judging by the reviews, everyone liked it and only the appearance of Boris Wolfson interrupted the heated discussion =)



Ahead was the last training - Risk management in agile, which was more like a munchkin in agile =) Something more like a Business value game. I want to play myself, because I missed everything = (

Day two: Volga, kvass, sand and agyle.

The second day was more than wonderful - lots of sunshine, lots of fun and interesting topics.











We talked again about agile games, motivation of employees when working remotely, agile for designers and much more. What I personally brought out for myself:

• Before the games, you need to accurately understand the audience;
• sometimes it is worth creating artificial problems for the team to rally it;
• designers should learn a lot from archaeologists;
• the most delicious whiskey - in Scotland =)

Excellent conference format: communication, communication and nothing but communication. Already I want to repeat, although the usual Agile Days, I also look forward to it.



Another of the results of the conference are two future posts / reports: Types of Skrams and Why the Agile is similar to the World of Warcraft. And also I invent a number of trainings, including with agile games.



PS: Photos of Anatoly Kukayev, Boris Wolfson, Nikolay Almenkov, Alena Shepeleva were used.