Italian Agile Day in Bologna - 20.11.2009

Last Friday I went for my first time to the Italian Agile Day, a day of full-immersion in the world of the Italian Agile community, even free as it's autofinanced through donations. This event has grown significantly over the last years, peaking in 400 people attendance last year.

Hosted in a very modern hotel in the suburbs of the city, the conference was organised in three parallel tracks with strong presentations and an open space.

The day started with Peter Stevens' keynote about how agile, with its continuous value delivery, is, in fact, the only way to attack fixed-price projects.

Afterwards the three tracks continued separately: most of the discussions were about the practices of agile, but with some notable excursion into coaching subjects.

The open space was very interesting too: self-organisation ruled and a lot of good discussions came to life, giving me a very good image of the state of agile in Italy. It was interesting to note how the strongly hierarchical and personal-power-oriented structure of the average italian management is shaping the approach to agility somewhat differently than in other countries: software engineering practices are very strong, while Scrum and all the organisational development aspects of agile are a strongly felt wish, but rarely practiced.

Overall a very good day spent meeting a lot of interesting people and making some new friends in this part of the world. Yes: another trip to plan for the next year!