Robert Chatley

XPDay London

26th December 2008

A slightly belated writeup of the XPDay conference that happened in London on the 11th-12th December. This was the 8th incarnation of the conference, organised by the eXtreme Tuesday Club - with me as conference chair. This year we wanted to focus on the state of the art of agile (rather than introductory material), and so made a few modifications to the conference. We reduced the size of the event, from around 200 participants last year, to around 135 this year, the idea being to allow all the sessions to be smaller and more interactive. We also went for a variation in format, giving over about half of the conference to Open Space sessions.

The open space was ably facilitated by Rachel and Willem. I was a little worried about how well this would work, but luckily due to the sort of people that come to this conference, lots of people were keen to pitch in and propose sessions, especially on the second day of the conference once things had got going. We also introduced lightning talks on both days to give delegates the chance to express their thoughts to the group briefly (5 minutes maximum) and without having to go to the trouble of coming up with a whole session. Some personal highlights amongst the lightning talks were Keith's explanation that most people don't think in category theory, and Gwyn telling us about how his team employ the sword of integration.

On day two, after a night chatting over a few beers in a local hostelry, everyone was back for more. Something I particularly enjoyed on day two was Yves and Vera's session on team compensation. How do we build a compensation strategy that encourages people to work together cooperatively, rather than rewarding individual contribution. We had an interesting discussion and I really liked the slides they used to present the scenario.

So, all over for another year. I'm looking forward to 2009 - we just need some people to organise it...