Agile 2013 has kicked off this week in Nashville, TN and is the premier international Agile Conference run by the Agile Alliance. This year the conference has attracted a record breaking 1725 attendees from all over the world. The attendee mix is mainly Agile practitioners making up 50% of the attendees with 15% at the beginner stage. Interestingly, 50% of attendees are from organisations with over 1000 employees which is a good indicator that Agile is well and truly being used at scale throughout the enterprise.
This year, InfoQ has coverage from Shane Hastie, Craig Smith, Todd Charron and Pete Tansey who are covering the important sessions, interviewing key experts in the Agile community and keeping an eye on the vendors who support the Agile community.
The following is the first the roundup from the vendors who are exhibiting at Agile 2013.
ASPE: ASPE provides Agile coaching and consulting worldwide with a focus on enterprise roll outs. This is their third year at the conference. They develop custom training solutions for their clients as well as scalable and repeatable training programs. They will be rolling out SAFe training in September.
CA: Agile is currently their biggest area of growth. At the conference, CA was demonstrating their Clairty Agile product for Agile project management. They heavily involve their customers in the development of the product, including inviting them to both demos and daily stand-ups. They have been practicing Agile interally which has also helped to drive the development of the product. Version 13.2 was released just prior to the conference.
IBM: IBM had Rational Team Concert on display. Rational Team Concert is an all in one ALM tool designed primarily for developers. It was designed based on the observation that other ALM tools were used by Scrum Masters and project managers, but largely ignored by developers. The tool currently supports SAFe, DAD, Scrum, Hybrid, and Waterfall models to help organizations bridge the gap when transitioning to Agile.
ICON Training: ICON Training provides Agile training and coaching with a focus on Agile at scale. They were advertising their expertise in both SAFe and DAD. They were fans of both approaches based on their simularities to RUP, which they were also very experienced with. ICON prides itself on the depth and breadth of their trainers experience and works to ensure that they bring the right people to their clients.
Logigear: Logigear provides software test automation tools and services. They most recently unveiled their Mobile Plus solution for automated mobile testing. They position themselves as a balance between larger commercial tools such as QTP and open source tools like Selenium. They also provide services to customize their software for their clients.
Platinum Edge: Platinum Edge was led by Mark Layton, author of the book Agile Project Management for Dummies. They are a transformation company that embeds coaches fully into organizations before transitioning into a mentoring role. They use techniques from behavioural science to focus on people first and foremost in their transformations. They have a 100% client recommendation rate over their 12 years in business.
Scrum Alliance: Once again the Scrum Alliance had a strong presence at the conference. While they did not have a booth, they did provide a "Coaches Clinic" that was staffed by Coaches from the Scrum Alliance who were available to spend some one on one time with attendees answering their questions about Agile and Scrum.
Software Education: Software Education focuses almost entirely on training. They have been around for 23 years, mostly in Australia and New Zealand, but are now going global. They pride themselves on the expertise of their people and their passion for teaching. Their training is based around the ICAgile model and focus on ensuring that developers, testers, and business analysts all feel included in the Agile transformation process. They consider themselves in the top of their space and well connected in the community.
Telerik: Telerik was showing off their Team Pulse Agile project management software which supports Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban. The tool was originally written in Silverlight but is currently being ported to HTML 5. They describe the tool as simple, yet customizable and very Agile focused. Team Pulse provides tools to assess projects against best practices, and they recently released bi-directional integration with TFS.
Thoughtworks: Thoughtworks was demonstrating their new Cycle Time Analytics feature in Mingle. This feature now allows users to track Cycle Time (the time from when an item is pulled into development until it is released in production). Using their tool you can see the average cycle time, outliers and trends, throughput trends, as well as highlighting bottlenecks in the system. They were also showing off Snap, which is their tool for providing continuous integration in the cloud. Snap currently works with Ruby and Heroku.