ThoughtShapes Shaping Ideas With Thought

Rjae, Rob, Kasia Baron, and I went to the Deep Agile 2008 conference run by New England Agile Bazaar. The event was held over the course of two days at MIT's Tang Hall and was truly outstanding. The structure of it, as noted at Agile Bazaar's website, was a one-on-one discussion, debate-style, between Robert Martin and James Coplien and it focused on the realities of Agile software development.

I see a great many projects start off on the wrong foot by trying to decide all of their implementation technologies at the beginning of a project. Usually there’s a project kick-off meeting where everyone flies in from various locations to get introduced to all of the players and decide on things like what database engine are we going to use? What technology will we use to handle our data access? What user interface technologies should we use? Should we use web services?