Fred and I spent two very enjoyable days at the XP Day conference, last week. As you might guess from its name, XP Day started out as a very specialised event for the Extreme Programming community, but over 6 years it has blossomed into a convention for all things Agile - and a very good one at that.

There were many excellent and thought provoking workshops and seminars. Some which stood out were:

• Jeff Patton’s excellent keynote (Anyone who manages to bend the lyrics of Roger Waters, the Spice Girls and the Sex Pistols to suit a lecture about how best to implement Agile practices gets my respect!)
• Emmanuel Vaillot’s simple but effective workshop “writing on the walls”. For someone with little or no experience of using information radiators (a la Alaistair Cockburn), this was exactly what I needed.
• Keith Braithwaite’s session on Test Driven Development
• The final session in the river room: “Are we in danger of compromising our agility?” / “Have we lost our mojo?”, where a panel of agile “old timers” pontificated over whether Agile has mutated into little more than a marketing term. Happily, the consensus in the pub seemed to be that it is still very much alive and kicking.

As with any good conference, the best bit was the networking and socialising. Hurrah to XP Day for organising both free drinks and food on both evenings! We had lots of good techy (and non-techy) chat and made some new friends.

All Photos courtesy Adewale Oshineye