Back from SEPG — Very pleased!

All-in-all the event was a success for me and Entinex. Today’s panel discussion on Agile & CMMI went well, I thought… If a measure of success can be the fact that most of the audience stuck it out for the entire double-session w/out taking even a bio-break and then stayed on after the allotted time and into the afternoon refreshments break… I guess you could say it was pretty high-value.

The panel was excellent. Each person had a different perspective on the matter which did add depth — even though we all pretty much agreed that CMMI and agile methods are not incompatible. I’m sure a more lively panel would have been one that also included an agilist and a “big” process person who didn’t believe the two can play nicely, but I think it was important that a group of people with different perspectives came together to make an essentially unified front in moving this topic off the “no way” list and into the “let’s make it happen” list.

From the panel I shamelessly plugged this blog (with the moderator’s consent) as a place where those who agree (or are at least at a point where they can carry on a serious, productive discussion and investigation) can collaborate and discuss the topic. I’ve created a discussion group for it and will see about making a companion bulletin board or RSS/Atom feed to it here. (In my copious spare bandwidth.)

David Anderson’s impressive presentation near the very end of the day had some really killer information. What he’s working on over there in Redmond should take this business by storm. I’m looking forward to heading out there this summer to get an up-close and personal tour of their work.

I’m really quite feeling accomplished at all the great people I met there and anyone reading this whose name doesn’t explicitly appear in these posts, please don’t be offended. The discussions and serious issue-hashing were informative and productive. There are many of you with whom I hope to be in regular contact to move this matter forward and ultimately make it a non-issue. Technical Reports are already in the making, but they will need people to carry the message and this space is what I hope we can use to make that happen.