This year’s Agile Roots conference is focused on building great software. They have a terrific line up of speakers and it only costs $250, which makes it a great deal! The conference this year focuses on the development process and how it formulates requirements that lead to great software. Not just great software to maintain and build. But also great software that provides value to users.
Andrew explained that we, as developers, need to realize that we’re enabling a business experiment, not just building code.
He also went into the value we receive from open source software. The problem some of these people have is collecting the value of their work. You don’t get paid for being smart. Rather, we need to find ways to receive value from what we’re providing, even if it’s not designed specifically to make us money.
Pat Maddox wrote a blog post called “Are you punching your users in the face?” It was designed to help people to understand was that the value of the code isn’t in the tests or the code itself. Its value is in building software that users want to use.
We got a great recommendation to read “A Big Ball of Mud”. The author asked “What do you call someone who writes code like this?” after talking about every antipattern and code nastiness and he said “millionaires.” Historically this is true. Someone solved someone else’s problem with ugly hacky code, and walked away with millions of dollars.
We tend to discount sales and marketing personnel, when they are the ones that make your money. They build the brand and they bring the money in, even if you don’t have the best products.
Tim O’Reilly said, “Create more value than you capture.” If you do this your users will love you and your community will grow and support you.
We go into the idea economy and how agile ties into the idea economy. People are trying to sell each other on their ideas in agile as much as anything else.
Andrew was first introduced to Agile he found most of the practices as wasteful, painful, and wrong. So, he started discovering the roots of Agile. What he found was that Agile was bout solving our problems with our strengths. Once he started going to the Agile Round Table, he found that it was actually about delivering working software.
Over the last year and a half, Andrew has been working on taking agile into other areas of work.
The term ‘agile’ has become overloaded. Some people say agile, what most people mean is a watered down half implemented version of scrum.
Agile, the word, has crossed the chasm. The practices haven’t.
Trying to agile isn’t what you should do. You should be trying to be awesome.
Listen to the interview for some great tips on being awesome.
Here are some links to following Andrew:
Twitter: littleidea
