Smidig 2008 is delivered!
The Norwegian Agile User Group conference, Smidig 2008 was on Thursday and Friday. Both days started with three hour sessions of Lightning Talks, followed by three hours of open space work groups after lunch.
We have been very happy with the format. The lightning talks give people food for thought. The best lightning talks are formulated around a provoking hypothesis. Kai Gilb talked about how we should focus on value instead of function. Kaare Nilsen said that we should really stop saying we’re doing scrum, because nobody is really doing it. Eirik Bjølsnøs said that plugin-architectures will lead to more changeable systems. Olve Maudal said that you should always leave the code a little cleaner than how you found it. Karianne Berg said that throwing away your codebase to start over is a mistake. These were just some of the many provoking ideas people presented.
Some statements you may agree with and some you might disagree with. Some, you want to examine in more depth. That’s why we have set up the open spaces. Norwegians are known as being sort of introvert, but walking around during the open space, you would never guess it.
My only regret is that I could only see one track of lightning talks at a time. The conference has been filmed, and hopefully it will only be a few weeks before all the videos will be available to the public.
Great thanks to everyone who helped make the conference a success: Organizers, volunteers, speakers and especially the participants. An extra big thank you to those who traveled from Bergen, Trondheim, Kristiansand, Florø, Stockholm or elsewhere to attend the conference.
The discussion continues on the Norwegian Agile forum. Why don’t you join in?