Last month's Scrum Gathering, 2011 Seattle Global Event, was a roaring success, but don't just take our word for it. Have a look at what attendees of the conference had to say:
The Global Gathering in Seattle started with a buzz of energy and got progressively better each day! The conference embodied the true spirit of continuous improvement. The food on the second day was better than the first day, for example. Coordination around the “Coaching to Go” sessions improved as well.
The keynotes were some of the best I’ve seen, being both fun and relevant. Each keynote was inspiring and provided the audience useful information. It was a strong move to bring in folks “outside” the community to speak – Stephen Denning, for example. The Un-Conference was a huge success. I commented in the open space retrospective that I was surprised by the knowledge I gained but didn’t expect to gain going into the sessions.
It was refreshing to see a couple themes permeate the conference. One was recognition that being Agile for the sake of agility isn’t the goal, but rather a means towards delivering results. The other was recognizing that Scrum isn’t the solution to every problem. I was impressed by the discourse that surrounded the use of Scrum in organizations.
When we got back to the office, our team inventoried the “new things to try” that we took away from the conference, which totaled 32+ tangible activities! These are new ideas and insights that we likely would not have gotten except by attending the conference.
~ Sean Rich
The Scrum Gathering in Seattle turned out to be even more fun and exciting than I had anticipated. Chet and I came in in time for the CST retreat and enjoyed the Open Space format greatly. Michael James (MJ) ran an excellent session and there was always something good to talk about.
Then Sunday night we got an emergency call to help deal with the fact that Stephen Denning, the keynoter, had airline problems and was unable to get in in time. Chet and I would have been happy to do a punishing keynote but to everyone's good fortune, Chris Sims had a better idea, which we immediately got behind. His audience participation session was excellent and did a lot to get everyone on the same page at the beginning of the conference.
Denning's keynote, held over a lunch hour, was inspiring and worth waiting for. All the sessions that I attended were very interesting as well. Often I wished I could spawn a subprocess or send an avatar to a second one: the choices were difficult.
As always, it was the hallway conversations that were best. The availability of tables outside the meeting rooms meant that folks could sit down and chat, and you could always count on people dropping by and joining in the discussion.
All through the conference, the staff were inspecting and adapting to make things better. Special notice goes to Jessica, who seemed to be everywhere, doing everything, and never running out of energy. And the food! Best conference food since the old OOPSLA conferences, and congratulations for having diet cola all day long!
Scrum Gathering was an excellent conference and I'm glad I attended.
~ Ron Jeffries
Exhilarating, refreshing, reassuring, motivating, amazing; these are just a few of the words that come to mind after attending the Seattle Scrum Gathering. This was my first Scrum Gathering event and to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Sure, I’ve been to many conferences during my career in the technology field, but this turned out to be different (in a good way). This conference was all about quality; quality speakers, quality keynotes, quality food, quality conversations, quality facilities, and quality organizers.
There were so many good session choices on the program that I found it difficult to choose and ultimately had to split up my time between the various tracks. Personally, I enjoyed every session I attended and cannot wait to see the presentations from the speakers I missed. While getting a wealth of information from every session I attended, I really enjoyed Jeff Patton’s discussion on “Building Rigorous User Experience Design into Scrum”. UX in agile is something my organization has struggled with in the past, and the topic was both very timely and relevant for me.
The last day of the conference turned into a “Un-Conference” leveraging Open Space methodology. Having never participated in a forum quite like this, I have only one word to describe the entire “Un- Conference” experience: awesome! The discussions that spawned from the breakout sessions were packed full of experience. I was able to both contribute to and consume the ideas and suggestions on the various topics. For those of you who missed this portion of the conference, you really missed something special.
By far, the highlight of the entire event was the closing keynote, Joe Justice from www.wikispeed.com. Joe’s keynote was a discussion about how he and his team of volunteers had used lean-agile and scrum methods to build a four-seat passenger car that gets 114 MPG for competition in the Progressive Automotive X Prize. I had the pleasure of meeting Joe after the keynote, he is truly an inspiration and I hope to work with him in the future on his endeavors. Joe was the perfect person to close out this grand event.
~ Jeff Leach
posted by Lisa Hoover (01 Jun 11)