Last week I presented at Falando em Agile, the flagship Brazilian conference on Agile software development. It was a very nice conference with out-of-the-basics content.

The most polemic talk, as expected, was the one by David Anderson. It was a simplified version of his Agile 2008 talk. I can’t really say I agree with most of it. Actually, to be fair David lost me in the very first ten minutes when he used metrics like bugs per line of code and function points.

My guess is that he is trying to make software development look like a chain so we can use good old manufacture optimization techniques in it. Well, if I’m correct I have to remember that this idea is not new and Software Factories already failed. The very fact that David bases his arguments in metrics like bugs/LoC shows the problems in this approach: software development is different from manufacturing. Danilo Sato –who presented a very informative and fun talk with Frank Trindade- reminded me of a text by Richard Durnall that really nails it:

In Lean Ops we made a mistake. We looked at what we thought Lean organisations were doing, we read the books and we assumed that Lean was all about applying the things that we saw and read. We spent time introducing pull systems, kanban processes and just-in-time and for a period we got improved results. We never got the breakthrough results we hoped for and when we turned our backs things went back to the way they had always been. Why?

…

In Lean Ops we missed this deeper philosophy. We focussed on the tools and when they didn’t work we just tried harder to enforce the application of the tools. The irony! We went through ‘The Tool Age’ and emerged the other side with a new understanding of the challenge we faced.

In other talks it was fun to see people desperate to prove the audience that their tools are ‘agile’. Good old BDUF now is done with colored post-its and the Borland guy said that they “prefer Scrum because it is more mature than XP”, whatever it means.

The other talks were just great. We had people from a small consulting shop presenting how they managed to use agile methods in Brazilian Air Force, a very bureaucratic and traditional place.

Alex Magno presented on how to integrate agile and PMI practices. I still don’t think it is as simple as he states but it was very interesting. Jose Papo presented on agile contracts.

Antonio Carlos from Yahoo! Brazil presented on prioritization and stakeholders (he actually used the term Product Owner but I’m really not a fan of Scrum lingo). I know Antonio for a long time and ever since he got to the Agile world he is worried about how to make devs and business people play nicely. The talk had some techniques and he shared some of his experience.

Danilo Bardusco and Guilherme Chapiewski presented about their experience in Globo.com. The company is a reference in agile adoption in Latin America, 4 of the conference’s speakers –including myself- were part of the team that introduced Agile thinking and practices there.

My presentation was the final one. It started a bit messy but I think I got the right rhythm by the middle and given the number of questions in the end I assume it was ok. I presented two real world cases of teams that remove agile practices with no knowledge of the impacts that would cause and concluded by saying that agile practices are cyclic and that removing or changing practices is not something simple.

As I said this was a fantastic conference. Brazil is really trying hard to understand what agile methods are about.