This day’s “Agility in Perspective” track was my main reason for coming here. The highlights this day were many:

• “The Origins of Lean Software Development“, Mary Poppendieck. This was an inspiring and excellent session about Lean Software Development, which is not an agile method as such, but more a way of thinking. Poppendieck believes the key is to have short information feedback loops and she draws many parallels to lean manufacturing and the Toyota production.
• “The Roots of Scrum“, Jeff Sutherland. Another very inspiring session about the roots of Scrum, by the inventor of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland. This method as well the other Lean and agile ideas comes originally from the Toyota lean manufacturing techniques. (I will investigate the Toyota methods more deeply one day.)

Find out more about Scrum.

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After the keynote by Ivar I stayed on the “Sixth Generation Languages” track, which was a good decision with many interesting sessions:

• “Beyond Agile: Smart“, Ivar Jacobson. On the stage was a man all dressed in black and the hair dyed red, wanting to make an impression. I’m not sure he succeded though, I expected more. Ivar taking credit for being the inventor of agile methods through RUP, which he claims always have been agile. I know of a few organisations that don’t agree. RUP tries to fit so many different setups that it disqualifies as agile. Interpreted correctly it’s great, but too many interpret it wrong. He continued to talk about tacit and explicit knowledge to highlight some of the difficulties of scaling both RUP and agile methods into the future. His solution is to stop reading books(!) and introduce “smart” agents instead, and developers in India. Missing a proof of concept, I don’t see it as a believable future scenario.
• “6th Generation Languages - Back to the Future“, Dave Thomas, Bedarra. This was a great session that first gave a brief history of different xGL languages having the audience remembering the good old days, and then continuing to presenting the challenges of next generation languages. He finished by presenting different paths towards future languages, containing scripting, DSL, Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Domain Oriented Programming (DOP) as the main concepts.
• “The Model-Driven (R)evolution“, Richard Soley, OMG.
• “Future Trends in Open Source“, Brian Barry, Bedarra.

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This is my first JAOO conference in Århus. The main reson for me coming here was the tracks on agile development. Perhaps that’s why I was a bit disappointed after the first day. I should have stayed on the “patterns” track, it came off with a good start, but instead i switched to “improve your projects”. Well, the highlights of the first day were:

• “A Personal History of Patterns“, Ralph Johnson, University of Illinois. One of the co-authors (the gang of four) of the book on Design Patterns, this session was an interesting walk down memory lane of design patterns. It was mostly name-dropping of people that have had a lot of influence on the scene of design patterns until today. Interesting for someone who hasn’t been around as long as some of these dinosaurs. (the book in question: “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software““)
• “Improve IT Project Management“, Peter R. Hill, ISBSG. This was a great session about software metrics. The International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) provides data for estimation, planning, benchmarking and academic research from a repository of 3000+ projects.
• Conference Party. This was definately a highlight with great food and great music from a danish all female band.

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