For 10 years, the Agile Software Community of India has been holding this conference now, with ever growing numbers and great names from everywhere. With more than 1200 participants, more than 250 of these from other countries than India, extending from Norway to New Zealand, from Indonesia to Ukraine, and more than 300 women, Agile India 2014 was a huge and really diverse agile conference.

 In the previous years, I had already received positive impressions from the colleagues in Bangalore. This year I had the pleasure of participating for the first time myself, presenting the story of our Distributed Product Owner Team for an Agile Medical Development. The process of selection of topics and feedback was very well prepared and community based. While everybody could see the proposals, ask questions and comment on them, the members of the program committee took care that this would happen consistently, and did a lot of it themselves as well. For the topics selected by them, also an extended paper was necessary with a case study, which also underwent a feedback and approval process, in my case by Ravi Kumar and Pramod Sadalage .

Fortunately, I had work to do in India as well – start up trainings for a few new Scrum teams at our company – so I already had the justification for going. On the other hand, I had enough work to do so that I could not consider going to the other conference days, apart from the one I was speaking at. So I can only talk about the Offshore Distributed Agile track.

I enjoyed Todd Little’s keynote in the morning very much. One of the key messages that resonated most in me was „We need to treat remote teams not as coding monkeys but empowered Ewok.“ I hope as software specialist, you are familiar with the Star Wars universe and do not need to look them up in Jedipedia.Todd said exactly what we are trying to do in our big, distributed product development, and my mission to Bangalore was part of it: make the remote teams self-organizing, trusted members of our diverse product development universe. Only that in Todd’s presentation, it turned out that he only needed to add a few software developers with a domain specialist in Romania and a small test automation specialists’ team in Vietnam to his original group in the US – and they were already very successful. So: adding the right people for a good reason, valuing the individuals over corporate strategic outsourcing strategies.

The other talk I remember well was from Rajkumar Anantharaman from Intel, who stated „If you want to go lean and agile, first you need to get rid of Excel and PowerPoint“. This was of course not aimed at a nice PowerPoint by the Product Owner showing some functionality the users ask for, but at getting rid of the additional reporting needs that keep teams busy with overhead.

The venue was a bit resisting the actual number of people participating, it is certainly difficult to predict, but maybe another year they will be better off in a congress center. A difference with the European agile conferences I have been attending like ALE or XP was certainly that there were much more business-people than agile coaches hugging each others. Maybe even most agile coaches look like business people in Asia. In all cases it is very important going to India and seeing what is going on there, noticing how people discuss, what they hold as granted in agile, and what they have still doubts about.

More or less, the other speakers confirmed what I have learned from our own experience: there is not the question whether or not agile is going to work with distributed organizations and teams in India, but how to make it work. You can do a pretty lot of things right or wrong, and even terribly wrong, but you can just as well be successful if you are doing many things right.  At the end of the track, there was a quite interesting panel discussion facilitated by Naresh Jain: Offshore Agile…An Oxymoron? There were a lot of interesting topics discussed. Where I could definitely contribute was when someone asked the panel whether they could just take a framework like SAFE and apply it to a big distributed product development organization to make it agile. According to my experience, though such frameworks can help, every organization has their own challenges, their constraints, and their organizational culture. Whatever lean-agile framework they will build, they need to build it on their own – but of course, taking as input the experiences of others, and agile frameworks as well as wonderful books like Bas Vodde’s and Craig Larman’s „Scaling lean and agile development“.

— Photos used by courtesy of  Agile India (c) —