Thursday, July 25, 2013

NEPHP 2013: Agile in the Workplace

So another talk I'm looking forward to seeing this year at Northeast PHP is 'Agile in the Workplace', to be given by Michael Stowe (more details at http://northeastphp.org/talks/view/57/Agile-in-the-Workplace and https://joind.in/talk/view/8914).

To understand why I'm going to find this talk interesting, you have to know that I tend to be one of those people that learns way more through practical examples than I ever do through theory.

The concepts intrigue me, however all the reading in the world is not going to make it all fall together without real life exposure. Unfortunately that would mean finding and working with a group that practices agile correctly... which is not really an option for me. So instead, I'll take the second best thing: I'm going to listen to someone talking about it, and no doubt listen to stories about practical examples.

I'm looking forward to hearing the good and the bad about the process, and ways that I can avoid following those bad practices. For what it's worth, the reason I highlighted the word 'correctly' above is because from what I understand, 'agile' can very easily be a word that gets thrown around by groups, without actually being agile. Every story I've heard about these groups tends to imply that there is a very painful lesson to be learned about the difference between being agile and thinking you're being agile.

Hopefully, too, there may be a way to correctly ease a team into an agile workflow, which I believe would help everyone by being an evolution as opposed to a revolution.

Either way, I say 'viva la agile'. Or something like that... My French is not so good.

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