Agile Basecamp Ukraine : Impressions/Summary

In general: conference was quite positive emotionally and mostly light on the brain (almost no complex theories/metrics/formulas out there). Lots of interesting edutainment-like report formats and talk-provocative meetings. The place was also quite nice, I regret I did not take any photos while being there.

DataArt's after-party rocked, that's for sure: but I did not really see any technical (or at least PR) report on the company's projects/teams/positions itself, which would fit quite nicely (at least) into the Open Space section (I guess).

UPD: So, here's the link to conference presentations on SlideShare. Also I've updated books and ideas section, so check'em out. My personal TODO: compensate for missing presentation on Estimation Techniques.

General Agile Resources:

• Agile manifesto (the very basics); 
• Mike Kohn's blog, and his site (evangelist);
• DSDM, Crystal Clear and Scrum-ban (some of adjoined methodologies);
• Chris Avery (team management);
• Tasty Cupcakes (educational games, some of them being Agile-centric);
• Bury Agile, not praise it (one hour of Agile evangelism and top-level discussion).

Recent Books on Agile, (and links to the authors' blogs):

• User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development Agile Estimating and Planning (Mike Kohn)
• Continuous Delivery (Jez Humble);
• Scrum and XP from the Trenches (Henrik Kniberg);
• Crush It (Gary Vaynerchuck) - looks like some brain-bender for a startup manager
• Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - looks like another enterpreneurish brain-twister...

Ukrainian Agile resources (no particular order here):

• The Improved Methods;
• DataArt Club;
• ScrumGuides.com;
• Agile Group Ukraine (and the google group);
• Agile Eastern Europe;
• XP Injection.

And couple of other sites of possible interest:

• Project management institute (and discussion of agile PP certificates);
• PM Zone;
• IT HR-ов Харькова;

Some tools which were discussed on the conference:

• redmine (tracker with lots of Agile-ish yummies) - missed some of core plugins though;
• gitosis (some kind of large-scale git management tool);
• jenkins (a fork-off/rebranding of Hudson, was new to me).

Nice ideas having crossed my mind while I was listening (no particular order here, too):

• ROI metrics / Survey integration: which basically means that customer feedback surveys are aligned with sales so we (roughly speaking) are able to estimate profit we get for each vote on any particular feature
• Web-version of Scrum/Kanban board for a distributed team: oh this all really has something to do with HTML5, like that Spaaze project I've recently seen; just do that thingy via HTML5, and cast it off to the wall with a projector or wide plasma or something...
• Start-up evaluations / Vision brainstorming: I really liked that presentation on Vision elaboration and would use that on any of my ideas before I start designing or coding.
• free HTML5 mindmapping (yeah, ditch java from this domain, at last): well, I am late as usual: mind42, bubbl.us, MindMeister;
• some time tracker/todo manager startup which beats RTM? The main idea is that if your application is quite well-profiled you may bite reasonable share of a crowded market: I'd recently searched for these applications and still have no proper solution: I'd like to see Hamster being cross-platform and having the Pomodoro features of workrave;
• switch my lecture style to this Lightning Talks format: some of lectures, at least course section intros/outros would be quite engaging/igniting the students to work on the course... ;)

Particular/remarkable idioms: soft commit, focus factor, planning poker.