Another interesting Agile Finland Seminar

Yesterday another Agile Finland seminar was held in Helsinki. There were 3 speakers and the guest star of the day was Tom Gilb.

Tom has been working in this field for many years and pitches himself as a precursor of the agile movement. He mentions “iterations” as something that he popularized in one of his books.

Tom stated that current agile methods lack quantification and that’s why his own proposed XE (as in eXtreme Engineering) is better. In his method he adds a few things on top of a normal iterative process like scrum (weekly iterations, weekly one-page, status reports) but most importantly he adds the requirement for “quantitative” requirements. He basically said: “if you cannot quantify your requirements you cannot know if you are achieving them”. He pitched quantification as the key aspect of the XE method.

In the Agile community we have not discussed quantification and scientific analysis very much, in my opinion this is something that will become more and more important in the near feature.

Macs taking over the world?

It was also nice to notice that a lot more Macs were visible in the auditorium, previously we had seen only PC laptops but now I only saw Macs everywhere (with one exception), could this mean that Macs are becoming the tool of choice for IT professionals? Certainly there are more and more reasons to do it. With most of the tools we use daily moving to the web or a hosted version you become tied only to your browser, not your OS. As a side note it is also worth to note that of the 3 presenters 2 had Macs!

All in all a very nice seminar that was followed by a lively discussion in a close by restaurant that was certainly happy to get the extra business from the agile crowd! 🙂