Agile 42 at the Scrum Gathering

It was great to get together last week with old friends and colleagues Alex Aptus and Andrea Tomasini, who were over in London for the Scrum Gathering 2007. They are both doing Scrum consulting and training in Germany. Andrea's company is called Agile42 and if you think about it the name has some logic to it - "agile" is the undisputed answer to all the major questions of software engineering (mmm...?) in the same way that 42 is the answer to that only slightly larger chestnut: life, the universe and everything. Actually I'd recommend Alex and Andrea's work precisely because they understand that the answers to large questions are not trite or formulaic. If you manage to engage them for your project you'll not only get excellent training in standard methods but thoughtful and experienced consultants that will help you solve the hard questions too.

Another highlight of our meeting was seeing the newly opened St Pancras station on the day that the first Eurostar train arrived there from Paris. The queues at Europe's longest champagne bar meant that we weren't able to order their most expensive bottle at (literally) £2800 a pop!

By the way Andrea has a blog on Software Development Process in Practice. Why not check it out. He has a thoughtful article for example on requirements management. Here's the link: Software Development Process in Practice: Agile Product Development... How to manage Requirements? Effective requirements management has been shown time and again to be the most crucial aspect of successful projects so it's a worthy topic for discussion. I think it's an area that all of us involved with agile processes should be examining. My feeling is that agile methods stop too readily at the level of "features" without also trying to capture other aspects of requirements. 3 Types of Requirement tries to explain this - it summarises the results of some consulting in this area for a client adopting agile methods on very large projects.