Martin Fowler at Inaugural Agile Hong Kong Meeting

I just returned from the first Agile Hong Kong meeting. Martin Fowler happened to be in town and answered questions and talked about Agile to a crowd of over 50 people. A decent showing giving the relatively short notice of the event. The guys at ThoughtWorks did a good job putting everything together.

Martin Fowler talked about fairly basic agile software development principles. Most of the questions centered around the idea of how much design should be done upfront and how to introduce agile into existing projects working on legacy systems. He emphasized that one should “delay design decisions to the last responsible moment” and covered the core agile concepts of iteration, attitude towards change, and people (vs process) focus. All in all, I think it was a good Q & A session, though I wish there had been more time for more questions from the audience.

The hope is that this is the first of many Agile Hong Kong meetings, with the next one expected to be in early March. The details are still being worked out, so I would subscribe to the Agile Hong Kong rss feed or join the Facebook group.

Back when I was at Sony Electronics, Greg Akins and I tried several times to introduce more agile methods into our very small group, but it never really clicked (it was difficult enough to introduce proper revision control and bug tracking). Most of my agile experience comes from my work with Siemens Medical Systems which at the time was dedicated to implementing Scrum. Kevin Schlabach was the scrum master of the group I consulted with and during the time I was with them I saw agile methods make a difference in a difficult project. Having that first hand experience made me a fan of agile approaches.

Agile does have its detractors and skeptics but the core principles are solid. In most software development environments, introducing agile methods will help improve what is almost always a broken process. It’s not a silver bullet, but it can help expose some of the fundemental problems in a project and give team members tools and guides in solving those problems.

Anyway, it’s great to see an agile group started here in Hong Kong and the turn out we had tonight was excellent. Looking forward to more great meetings in the future!