Agile Portugal 2017 is a conference put together by a colective of professionals in this area. It happens on June 2 and 3 in Lisbon, and I talked to them to find out more about the event and their views on Agile.
What are the main highlights of the upcoming Agile Portugal 2017 Conference?
We will host 34 speakers that will deliver a rich schedule including 3 keynotes. about 20 talks and 8 workshops. The conference takes place in the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, and it will also include a thematic panel, open space sessions and a lot of networking between participants, sponsors and speakers.
What is the current state of the agile software development in Portugal?
Agile has been striving in Portugal for the last decade, and community efforts such as Agile Portugal, Agile Connect and others, have been contributing a lot to build a good knowledge base of agile practices and to bring them consistently to software companies.
Since 2010, when the first Agile Portugal conference took place, we have observed a significant evolution in agile in our country, either regarding early adopters, newcomers and companies making the pass towards agile.
The use of agile methods, best practices and daily rituals has really come to a high level from then, and our “agilists” soon began to share their rich experiences along their processes of agile adoption in their companies.
We would say that, nowadays, the level of agile adoption in Portugal is quite considerable and growing!
How can agile help companies grow?
Basically, focusing on people and embracing change. 🙂
The benefits of agile software development methods are clearer when their practices become a part of daily routines, effortless.
Companies have been feeling the changes towards improved software quality, and for some of them more recently, a cross-wide expression of Agile in all departments boosted companies performance. Expressions such as: continuous delivery of products/services, focus on the customer, team’s daily interactions, collective code ownership, flat management, people over processes and servant leaders, are now becoming a current and common lexicon.
Companies grow in performance with these practices, as they’re more compliant with today’s imperative time to market, cost of opportunity and global reach.
What can the Portuguese community do to help spread the agile word?
In fact, we believe that it has been happening quite well for the last 7-8 years. 🙂
We think it’s important for everyone that really wants to engage in the Agile movement to learn from the best professionals in the area. People that have decades of experience and that actually know “how to make things work”. Examples include this year’s Agile Portugal keynote speakers: Jutta Eckstein, Pawel Brodzinski and Acácio Cruz.
From there, people can start learning and daily applying the principles of agility, and trying to grow from really practical experiences. We value these personal experiences and we invite community members to share their case studies and personal experiences. Our “Call For Speakers” had almost 50 submissions this year.
Meetups, like the ones currently being organised by Agile Connect, DevOps Lisbon, DevOps Porto, and others, also help to spread the word through events closer to the community.
Where do you see agile evolving to in the coming years?
This one is difficult to answer. In some circles we see the word itself (“agile”) sometimes being taken as a synonym of specific agile methods, like is often the case with Scrum, but agile methods have a wider scope. The word is also sometimes used as a way to market snake oil products or consulting. These phenomena are likely to keep happening, and because of it, the word “agile” may start being connoted with less positive results.
On the other hand, as most teams use agile methods, the conversation will probably shift to more specific issues like testing and continuous delivery, to name two. Having said this agility is definitely here to stay, as the pace of change in the world will surely keep high, but we’re likely to start moving beyond (the word) “agile”. DevOps is a recent example of this, as its principles can be traced back easily to the agile manifesto, and even to some extreme-programming practices, that are recently getting more attention due to advances in the technology.
Give us a couple of reasons not to miss the conference
– Great speakers (from Google and other top level national and international software companies);
– Talks and Workshops with a wide choice of themes (Devs, DevOps, Management, Leaders, POs, BAs, etc)
– Networking with more than 200 people from the national and international Agile community;
– Great city, great food and a great place to learn from experiences!
Find out more about the conference at http://2017.agilept.org/
Leave a Comment