There are two things about Agile Australia that surprised me.

1. The level of participation: There were around 350 participants – in this period of economic slowdown it is a huge number
2. Missing Indian IT companies: None of the “tier one” Indian IT companies were around – neither as sponsors nor as speakers – why?

As per Gartner’s hype cycle on Application Development – Agile Methodology is supposed to be ’sliding into the trough’. You would not get that impression if you were around here. There was an unmistakable buzz that Agile is the way to go.

One more point which repeatedly came out – from speakers – from delegates – that top management support can really give a fillip to agile adoption.

In my panel I was expecting some amount of disagreement on the feasibility of “Distributed Agile”. However, to my disappointment, there was a quick agreement that it is definitely feasible but requires little bit of additional effort.

There were 3 sessions on using Lean & Kanban with Agile and they rekindled my skepticism about applying manufacturing principles to software development. One of the driving principles behind the development of agile methodologies is the fact that software development is different from manufacturing. Are we not repeating the mistake by trying to apply Lead & Kanban to software development?

On the whole it was a good show.