Field notes from SEPG-NA 2009 - Thursday

San Jase, CA.  Actually there won't, unfortunately, be much to report today as I was side-tracked from all but one session.  The session I attended was an experience report from a lead appraiser working with a company whose total size was all of 12 individuals.  In fact, they were a distributed workforce with no central offices.  Everyone worked from home.  This was a report on how they achieved CMMI ML3.  The company itself had very impressive results made possible by very impressive people and attitudes.  Let's get one (or two) things straight immediately: (1) they really truly were ML3, no corners cut, they really truly did the work of defining, managing and using their processes, (2) they did NOT need CMMI to be disciplined -- to a person they were highly skilled, highly technical, supremely professional, absolutely committed their work and company, incredibly laid-back, and deadly serious about NOT causing themselves work that was not fun and benefit the work and company.

The moral of this story is that the primary driver of improvement (of any flavor) is first and foremost attitude and culture.

Moving on.  I stopped by David Anderson's last talk of the conference on Metrics and Agile, and once again, it was close-the-doors-room-is-full SRO.  While other sessions were letting out early and people were streaming out right at the stop time (time for lunch!), David's session was full until kicked out.  Once again, put CMMI, Agile, and Maturity in the same space and sparks fly.  Dave impressed several very important people.

That's all I have to report today about the conference.  Stay tuned for SEPG-NA 2010.  I'm contributing to the program committee and know there are some really great things in store.  Planning for it started today and I've got action items due.  :-)