The fifteenth international conference on agile software development (XP 2014) was arranged between 26th and 30th of May in the sunny city of Rome, Italy. The local venue was more than excellent for the purposes for the conference, and overall the general mood during the week was relaxed yet functional. The approach to the discussions over the new trends of agile development was fit for the subject; flash speeches intersecting the open space sessions and presentations. In addition to this, conference also had managed to squeeze several workshops and tutorials into the program, so that the visitors got more than just a theoretical sampling of the new ideas.
The agile development methods are refined and matured, this cannot be disputed. In fact, looking into the conference in retrospective says much about the content, we are beyond the basic things and going into the advanced and specialized domains. Several presentations discussed and focused on different techniques, models and games which are meant to ease the application of agile principles, and in general, the focus seem to have shifted towards managing agile processes and scaling agility towards larger projects, away from the traditional software development. This was also mentioned in the most poignant keynote of the conference, given by Robert C. Martin, who saw that the ’agile world is falling into the pit of certification’. According to him, the best hope to avoid this unwanted development is to go back to the basic values and principles of Extreme Programming, and start again from there.
As per usual, there was a strong Finnish presence in the conference, and this may not be complete coincidence, since the new venue for XP conference will be at Aalto University in Helsinki. Aalto will be hosting the conference on 25th to 29th of May in 2015; more information, call for papers and other interesting facts are available at http://www.xp2015.org/.
Person reporting from the conference was Tuomas Mäkilä, who is currently working on the AgiES research project, focusing on the application of agile methods in the development of embedded systems.
