What a difference a YEAR makes!

Reporting here from Denver as I particpate in the NDIA CMMI conference (see this entry), I am happy to report that traction for agile and CMMI is really growing.

The Agile/Lean track sessions are full, attracting 40-80 people each (while there are at least 8 concurrent tracks). The presentations are unique and most of them are pointing out all the different ways in which to apply CMMI in agile settings and most of those are pointing out how it's poor CMMI implementations and bad processes that prevent agile from surviving in places where CMMI is being implemented. In fact, one presentation pointed out how being ('doing') agile actually takes more discipline than 'traditional' BPUF development because what BPUF does is actually abdicate to a contextually obsolete document the responsibility for staying on top of customer needs and priorities.

One fascinating (but not surprising) presentation was of a large systems integrator (i.e., "Defense Contractor") with a large Maturity Level 5 organization that is using agile approaches and maintains its Maturity Level practices. As you might imagine, there was hardly A THING about how they do it that isn't highly proprietary, so whatever the presenter said is about as much as I know about it. Still... I plan to become a really good friend to this person! :-)

Way cool!