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Lovely day in Wellington finding out about Agile software development last Friday, for event info see http://barcamp.org/BarCampAgileWellington.

I’m interested to know more about the actual methodologies (scrum, FDD etc), need to go read wikipedia and for a local rundown http://www.agilekiwi.com looks promising.

Can we have a cross disciplinary agile team?

Because my background is in working with (web graphic not technical) designers and developers/programmers to get sites built, I’m interested in how it might be possible to have a cross disciplinary ‘agile’ team, ie not just the backend development being agile. It’s possible I reckon, layout, visual design, content, IA, HTML, CSS are all things that can be built up (or built in parts) over several development cycles.

Is iterative the same as agile?

Many of the people there seemed to be thinking of iterative development as being agile - not sure this is really the case, sounded more as if ‘true agile’ means you build a piece of functionality fully and release it, then work on the next bit and so on? (Iterative dev you might still be waiting ages before anything is released & used.)

Agile modelling

So what would the documentation be like in an agile process, given that there’s not going to be much of it? Finding some pointers to info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_Modeling and good starter info at http://www.agilemodeling.com. Lots of ‘just in time’ stuff which sits pretty well with me

Agile rewards

The developers working with it all seemed to like the methodology, and it sounded pretty sane. Planning things well to build features people will use and soon, who knew eh. Reminded me of puppy training we’re doing at SPCA where you consistently reward positive behaviour with click & treat. (Or lunch!)