Dave West gave the opening keynote speech today at RE09, titled “Delivering Business Value with Agile Approaches to Requirements”. The keynote description had definitely caught my attention, and I confirmed in a quick chat right before his talk that Dave was fresh from the Agile 2009 conference (he was sporting his Agile Alliance/Rally logo’d lanyard).
I took extensive notes on my laptop, but wasn’t able to ‘live blog’ – we’ve got free wireless, thanks to the conference organizers, but power connections are scarce. My battery’s not as good as it once was, and having the wireless on during the day today would have killed it. So I apologize for the delay in getting this post online, but hope you find it worth the wait!
In a nutshell, Dave delivered – he was entertaining and provided some hot-off-the-press stats on agile adoption. The only ‘promised’ topic which I didn’t feel was well addressed was how ‘formality and discipline play just as important role with Agile methods as with traditional approaches’, and it was a bit under the bar re ‘provide concrete recommendations on organizations can resolve the conflict and build a better requirements discipline’. Everything else he covered was up to, or exceeded, my expectations. There were also some thoughtful questions from the RE09 audience in the limited time for Q&A.
Below are my detailed notes. Be advised that most of the percentages cited below are either subject to transcription errors, or were my approximations from reading column heights on a chart. Also, the bulleting is still a little rough/confusing, and I know I’ve used some personal abbreviations in here – with your permission and understanding, I’ll clean those up later.
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‘Expert Panel’ composed of presenters; we took questions from the audience. I’m third from the right.
At the start of my 