Yesterday Joel and I did the day long Agile precon at TechEd in New Orleans, LA. We had a great crowd and were able to keep them engaged for 8 hours. You can download the materials here.

We used an “Agile presenting” technique where we put the agenda in an “Agenda Backlog” and we reprioritized after every sprint (agenda item) and let the audience decide what we would talk about next. To our surprise the audience voted against two planned sections and we did two new sections on the fly. We talked about:

• Agile theory and agile methodologies (XP, Scrum, FDD, DSDM, *DD, Kanban, etc)
• Intro to Scrum
• Agile Estimation
• Challenges to Implementing Agile in General
• Challenges to Implementing Agile: In the Enterprise
• Challenges to Implementing Agile: Remote Teams
• Tools
• QA and Documentation

We got into a discussion on what happens when the team finishes early, do you stop the sprint, or give them more work to do. (Joel and I both go against the agile literature and give the team more work!)

We also took a few micro-breaks to rest our brain to talk about the iPhone v Android, how I buy Joel clothes, and movie quotes from the Matrix (I know Kung Fu) and What about Bob (Baby Steps).

We also recommended a book, one of my favorite management books of all time: Peopleware. For those of you non-techies reading this blog (I don’t know why!) if you manage teams, this book is also for you.

Hope to do this seminar again soon!