Photography by Edward Reardon, some rights reserved (Creative Commons).

Two weeks ago, Agile Alliance hosted the Agile2010 conference in Orlando, Florida. Although the Jama team couldn’t make it down for the conference (especially with the impending release of the Review Center…), we followed conference happenings through friends, blogs, Twitter, and Flickr. As event attendees continue to discuss conference take-aways  online, we’ve noticed a few trends:

Agile is evolving and increasingly mainstream. At sessions and in keynotes, Agile2010 attendees and presenters agreed that agile methodology is spreading. However, tied with its growth, agile practitioners felt like software still doesn’t have the “perfect” process, and it needs work.

Senior Forrester Analyst Tom Grant noted that there are more “Big Ideas that aren’t strictly agile, but important to agile’s success,” with the growth of agile. And at Jama, we agree. Purely agile methods aren’t realistic for every enterprise developer, but hybrid agile-waterfall principles and processes can transform development — and help companies build better products faster, cheaper and with exceptional quality.

From many bloggers at Agile2010, the growth of agile principles is also a exciting and frightening. There’s a “growing need for coaches in the agile community,” and a need for more support for leadership and exchange of ideas with peers. For this, conferences like Agile2010 offer real opportunities.

Read more on agile and the enterprise from Industry Analysts, Practical Agility, Edward Yourdon and Tom Grant.

Collaboration and communication are critical — especially in distributed teams. At the Industry Roundtable, David Norton from Gartner explained, “Organizations with distributed teams need to invest tools that will allow constant communication and knowledge sharing.” Other panelists suggested that although face-to-face contact is critical, as agile expands to larger enterprises, it requires creating a shared culture and understanding though different means. In Scott Ambler’s “Agile Mythbuster,” presentation, he explained that today, over half of agile users don’t work in the same room (42% of agile teams are colocated in the same space; 17% are in the same building; 13% are within driving distance; and 29% are “very distant” from other team members, according to his own survey).

At another session on Agile UX, Dave Nicolette learned that all those affected by a change in process, “have to be engaged during the planning stages” when implementing a new process. In his example, a UX team was blindsided by a shift in process when they were left out of communication and discussions. In this example, the UX wasn’t only confused, but also feeling “excluded, discouraged  and disconnected.” It took over a year to recover.

Part of collaboration is learning and listening to your colleagues. Jean Tabaka hosted a session on the Agile Organization, and discussed models for fostering communication and collaboration in your organization. Read more about her workshop here. Read more on collaboration from David Draper, Industry Analysts, and another post from Edward Yourdon.

To implement and truly invest in agile, you need management buy-in. This can be tough, as some attendees noted. Although there was a lot of diversity at Agile2010, the missing role was of the executive. Analyst Tom Grant notes that without executives at the conference, it’s impossible to build a winning strategy on how to get executive buy-in. Suggestions from panelists who’ve worked with executives include Michael Azoff from Ovum, who explained:

“Culture is the key – does the organisation’s culture support an Agile approach?  Understand the local organisational culture, find it’s strengths and work with those strengths to adopt an Agile culture. Agile techniques emphasise the importance of collaboration beyond the development group – collaboration with the business, the end user community, support departments such as IT operations and Human Resources; it is vital that Agile teams build strong relationships and build trust to ensure that they are given the time that Agile needs to enable the collaboration and dialogue to happen. Agile is not something that can be imposed on people – it needs to spread by example.”

Michael Azoff and other industry analysts held a roundtable and discussed the future of agile and how to best integrate it into different organizations and teams. Read some of their ideas from Shane Hastie’s blog post. Other ideas from Agile2010 on how to best integrate agile into your current method is to think about why you’re adopting — is it in response to changes? Is it because you need to deliver innovation faster? Understanding why you want to use an agile method will help you make it stick and focus the right methods towards the real values.

Tied to management buy-in is the need for integrations. In Tom Grant’s “Agile2010 Observations,” he writes that there isn’t a tools vendor that offers everything a team needs to remain in-sync. Tools are complex and diverse, and as Tom says, “need to find their niche and work well with their neighbors.” (If you’re interested in learning about Contour’s many integrations, click here).

Team leads have trouble estimating projects. In “Building a More Accurate Burndown: Using Range Estimation in Scrum,” Arin Sime from OpenSource Connections discussed five problems that team leads have in measuring project time: (1) you’re doing it alone, which is unreliable; (2) you’re doing it for others, and they don’t have a voice in the estimate, making them less accountable; (3) you’re being too optimistic, and trying to please the customer; (4) you think you’re an expert — and you may be — but it makes you overconfident (see The Black Swan); and (5)  you’re using single point estimates. For more detail on these five problems and some quick ways to combat them, see Arin Sime’s post. In a nutshell, Sime recommends range estimations made with the entire development team.

Read about how to better calculate burndown from Arin Sime, presenter of “Building a More Accurate Burndown,” or on the temptations that lead you astray and how to keep focused from Selfish Programming, presenter of “Pinocchio – On Becoming a Lean Leader.”

“It’s all the in the story cards.” The basis of good project planning is through building strong requirements (or stories). Poorly written or ambiguous story cards make for confusing and vague projects, breaking down innovation and efficiency. Different sessions and presentations discussed how create better requirements. We’ve compiled a list of ambiguous words to avoid from Karl Wieger’s Software Requirements. You can download our PDF here.

Agile processes require continuous improvement — moving closer to the (unachievable) perfection. Dave Nicolette of Effective Software Development (blog) and speaker on agile for IT enterprise, hosted a discussion on where agile is today in comparison to 2000. Read his full post on his presentation here.

Common agile stereotypes are funny… There was a great presentation on the problems with agile methods. They highlighted common mistakes including: Giving in instead of removing impediments, focusing on planning practices to the exclusion of delivery practices, ”One True Way”isms, ignoring high-bandwidth communication, leaving out the customer, not integrating testers, process navel gazing, and directive leadership (according to the presenters’ session proposal). After the presentation, the presenters hosted a discussion on how to combat some of these and other problems in agile. Dave Nicolette wrote down some observations after the session, and posted them to his blog here.

Not everyone agreed on the conference’s focus. Some people were frustrated that Agile2010 wasn’t as focused on technical sessions as on “softer” topics and project management. For agile coach Dave Rooney’s opinion of this, click here. For programmer Shane Hastie’s (different) opinion and a synthesis of the debate, click here.

From all my online research, my favorite quote? It’s from the Keynote address: ”We need to nourish the leaders of tomorrow. Always seek to replace yourself.”

For more information on the Agile 2010 conference, search #agile2010 on Twitter or read posts from the Agile 2010 Conference Community at agile2010.posterous.com.