The 10th anniversary edition of the XP Days Benelux 2012 conference was held on november 29 and 30, in the Netherlands.
XP Day Benelux is an international conference about Agile methods, intended for people from all walks of life who are involved with IT. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and beginners in Agile methods. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone.
The 2012 XP Days Benelux consists of 2 days with parallel sessions of 60-90 minutes, containing presentations, exercises and games. Day 1 was covered in XP Days Benelux 2012, first day sessions on agile. Some of the sessions from day 2:
- In bridging the management gap, Tiago Garcez discussed future possibilities for agile coaches in what he calls "agile beyond software" to reach the managers. He explored actions together with the attendants of his session to bridge the gap,to bridge the gap, like radical management, collaboration initiatives like the stoos network, and ideas like creating save environments where companies can play and learn.
- Emmanuel Gaillot & Eric Seguier talked about self-organizing organizations, for real. They bought a company and turned it into a co-operative business, with a permanent state of open space, collective decisions processes, and temperature reading. Their company has no hierarchy, there are no predefined solutions, and workers own the means of productions and choose their cadence to work. In a fishbowl discussion they went into detail about things like setting salaries, shareholding, scaling of the company and their personal motivation to work like this. Some of their conclusions from self-organizing are that communication matters a lot, shared vision is overrated, and that inclusion and exclusion of people can be a messy process.
- Hard choices by Julien Biezemans and Marc Lainez used a game to learn about technical debt. Playing the game helped attendants to get insight into factors that influence technical debt. It became clear to them how certain decisions lead to accumulation or reduction of technical debt, and how that influences the delivery of products, by discussing the winning and losing strategies from the players.
More information can be found on the XP Days Benelux conference website, which will also provide access to all conference materials in the near future. The 11th XP Days Benelux is planned to be in november 2013, in Belgium.