Better Software 2008

I just returned from four days in Vegas at Better Software Conference 2008.

There were about 700 attendees and over 50 speakers. Many speakers have published books and the quality of the presentations was consistently high, a lot of knowledge presented in a mostly academic style combined with actual stories of real-word experience. Most of the presenters were consultants, very few business leaders, entrepreneurs or corporate executives. The presentations I went to were well structured to encourage learning with various interactive exercises.

The attendees were a great mix of developers, business analysts, project managers, quality assurance, nice to see the whole lifecycle represented. I ran into several other architects although the architect role is not well represented in the agile community (I think we have a bad reputation around command and control style of architectures, which is a pity because we can play great scrum masters across projects, we can facilitate and collaborate) I was surprised that so many of the teams have adopted agile and there were manyscrum masters, although I met no product owners.

Only complaint was no structured social events so if you going to attend bring some colleagues! Some networking time, but for a largely introverted crowd I think some structure could have helped with greater connections in the evenings.

My biggest takeaway is Agile is now mainstream. Even thought there is another conference by the same organization specifically dedicated to Agile Practices – 90% of the presentations at this conference were around agile based techniques and there was a lot of comparisons with the old way of building software using waterfall processes (I saw a lot people wearing t-shirts from one of the vendors saying, “I’ve waterfallen and can’t get up”). There were a significant few of us (guessing less than 25%) who came from organizations using water fall processes, there was not of lot of the content that would help up within this process but a wealth of information about agile techniques and the reasons to go agile.

There are many metrics now available to demonstrate the value of agile methodologies, the following numbers were presented in a keynote by Jean Tabaka attacking waste in software development:

∙ Poor resource efficiency - Typical process value stream analysis of the waterfall software development process shows 6% of our work tasks are value-added.[1]
∙ Non-efficient feature flow – only 20% of Software features are often or always used and 64% are rarely or never used[2]
∙ Software as Product - On Premise software solutions are up to 90% more expensive to implement, customize, install, host, support and train than On Demand[3] .

[1] Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash. Poppendieck, Mary and Tom. Addison-Wesley, 2006.
[2] Standish Group Study Reported at XP2002 by Jim Johnson, Chairman ()
[3] Understanding the Total Cost of Ownership of a Hosted vs. a Premise-Based CRM Solution, Yankee Group - http://www.salesforce.com/form/pdf/yankee_tco_whitepaper.jsp

Powerful tools now exist to support the use of agile methodolies which can scale to enterprise size teams. These offer impressive tracking metrics and effiecient ways of communicating requirements and priotites to development teams. The main two vendors at the conference were: Rally Software and Version One