Agile Schmagile — ScanAgile 2012 trip-report

I always get easily confused when conferences have too many tracks going on. No, seriously. At first it gives you an illusion of choice but in the end you just realize that you missed most talks on the conference. In the end of the day you can never be sure if you have made all the right decisions when choosing one talk over another.

A fancy sticker I've got from the conference organizers. Self-irony is really one of the most valuable worldly skills :)

ScanAgile 2012 conference, which was held on 8th of March at Marina Congress Center in Helsinki, had three lecture tracks and one track reserved for workshops. Although the temptation to spend the beginning of the day playing Lego was very big, I decided to stick to the Human Touch track. It opened with a talk about complexity based approaches to project management by Dave Snowden, who has seriously challenged my English language skills. I got totally lost when Dave started to oppose “complex” to “complicated” and “effective” to “efficient”, which as I believed would mean pretty much the same thing regardless of the context.

The coffee break discussion on these things lead to The Quote of the Day by my friend Justus Karekallas, who explained to me the difference between something being complex or complicated with a philosophical statement: “Women are complex, so life is complicated.”

Luckily enough, Joseph Pelrine’s talk about Cynefin turned out to be a continuation of the topic, therefore many of these conceptual differences started to be much clearer.

According to Joseph Pelrine, agile is a good tool for making a transition from complex to complicated.

After lunch we decided to visit the Software Craftsmanship track, where Daniel Knott from Germany was giving an overview of automated mobile testing challenges and solutions. The automated mobile cloud testing (such as TestDroid Cloud, for example) seems to be something worth looking into, if you are dealing with mobile app development.

Next, back to the Human Touch track — Laura Snellman-Junna talking about “Mechanics of Empathy”. Generally an interesting psychological topic turned out to be even more exciting by following Dave Snowden’s twitter-criticism on almost every of Laura’s statements. However, one should definitely try to be aware of the effects of empathy on everyday life, regardless of the neuro-mechanical details behind it.

Laura used fragments from the Blade Runner movie, featuring the use of Voight-Kampff machine to detect androids based on their inability to feel empathy.

The rest of the conference was totally screwed up by one of the conference sponsor quests for getting the MacBook Air. We barely have seen The Unseen shown by Marko Taipale and the “aivobic” training by Reidar Wasenius was also left aside. And, sadly enough, we still didn’t manage to solve all the challenging puzzles. Anyhow, all the sponsors were generally very generous giving away tons of free after-party-drink tickets to sweeten the bitter pill of our failure.

This was not a bad conference all in all. Maybe it’s just me who visited one too many agile conferences last year and therefore did not find any exciting eye-opener talks on this years ScanAgile. But after all, it’s all about the community. Meeting new people, who are inspired by what they do cannot be underrated.