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!

Just a note to let everyone know that I’m in Denver, CO, attending NDIA’s 6th Annual CMMI Technology Conference and User Group event this week.

Monday I gave a CMMI Crash Course tutorial, and Wednesday I’m lecturing on My Agile Life with CMMI. I’ll be linking to both sets of content shortly.

I’ll be here through lunchtime on Thursday.
If you’re in the Denver area, gimme a holler.

A colleague pointed out that our rather hip CMMI FAQ was missing a rather basic FAQ:
“What is CMMI?“

Now the hippest (and best) CMMI FAQ on the web, has the best (though not as funny as we would have liked it to be) answer to that question here.

P.S. This week I’m teaching Introduction to CMMI (v1.2) in Atlanta, GA. Today was day 1. It seems to be going rather well. I like teaching to sharp folks.