AYE mates, I am late


The AYE conference, a place to learn about the human side of agility.

Last week, before I started this blog, I attended the AYE conference in Phoenix.

To start, allow me to give you a bit to history. AYE stands for Amplifying Your Effectiveness. It is a small conference of about 100 people and is held in early November. I believe that this was the fourth year. I have been to all four.

Now, why is this conference of interest to agile practitioners? Because it focuses on the human side of getting teams to work together.

For some time now, I have been convinced that adding more computer tools to the developers workbench will not result in any significant improvement in the speed of developing software. The developers themselves are pretty efficient. As teams, however, the efficiency is not so clear. The human side of development - teamwork, communication, consideration - has become the weak point.

Jerry Weinberg, who is is a long-time fixture in the development field, has been studying, teaching, and writing about the human side of development for many years. He was a keynote speaker at the recent Agile Development Conference in Salt Lake City. The AYE conference has emerged from Jerry's work and the people that resonate with his message.

Jim Highsmith of Adaptive Software Development fame was there and lead two sessions. I co-lead a session on measurement that discussed agile mechanisms. Johanna Rothman lead a session on agile planning.

It was hard for me to decide what sessions to attend. At any time there was usually four to choose from. Essentially all the sessions were directly addressing some issue that is important to us: communication, honesty, measurement, retrospectives, process improvement, learning in the organization, being an effective change agent.

The structure of the conference allows for lots of interaction and plenty of talk time. Most sessions have an interactive component.

It does my heart good to spend some time with people who believe that people are the key to success and know ways to improve the chances of your success.

Perhaps I will see you there next year.

Posted: Thu - November 13, 2003 at 03:14 PM      

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