Recently I went to XP Day 2005 in London. This was a two day meeting of more than a hundred; mostly developers and agile practitioners, but some from other camps too.

Given the critical tone of this post, let me emphasize up front that I'm really glad I went - I enjoyed it immensely and learned cool things.


For me the most valuable activity was talking with peers - sharing ideas and war stories, plus discussion of same. I would happily spend many evenings doing this.

There were some good sessions, too. But overall I got less from the sessions than I had expected. I think this was for two reasons.

Firstly, I sometimes risked going to sessions on left-field topics at the expense of the more certainly relevant. I may have avoided hearing obvious things I already knew, but perhaps I also heard some things I obviously didn't need to. Eliding the sessions I think I got little from, I am glad to have been introduced to mind-mapping and to have been persuaded to write haiku - although trying both underlined the fact that although I think fast (and talk probably even faster), I write painfully slowly.

Secondly, I did not gel with the more experimental style of some sessions. There were several that went: communal brainstorm, categorize ideas, assign one subgroup per category to discuss, present summaries. I was led to understand later that this is supposed to be a way of drawing something statistically significant from the available brain soup - identifying the most widely pertinent issues by letting them bubble up through this process.

Well, this did not work at all well for me. I would have welcomed more pre-filtering and less emergent fuzz - I felt I missed out on hearing the ideas and the opinions of the unusually well-informed. The best sessions I've experienced at other conferences have been presentations and discussions where I mostly listened and lurked, only occasionally publishing or debating. I appreciate that books and conversations aren't very trendy compared to wikis and tagging but perhaps we don't have the tools to explore the conference analogues of the latter just yet. (Or perhaps I just got unlucky.)

I wonder why I enjoyed the informal discussions outside of the sessions so much whilst wishing the sessions themselves would involve fewer discussions in little groups. I think it is because I want more control over who I talk to, and what about. Discussing a half-set topic in a group of intended equals with different levels of experience lost me most of the good chaos of conversation and gained me little of the good order of publishing.

Tags: software_development
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