Session title: One Hundred Agile Ideas

Submitters: Laurent Bossavit

(GMail address morendil@gmail.com)

Abstract: The Agile community thrives on a constant inflow of innovative ideas, stealing left and right and unabashedly from every discipline that can teach us something about software development. Our basic toolkit of programming and project management practices is still growing, but more importantly so is our bag of tricks for spreading the word about these practices, learning them, adapting and improving them and so on. Among these ideas, recent and less so, are "coding dojos", "software apprentices", "open space conferences", "welfare training", "craftsman swaps" and so on.

This workshop is about turning the creativity dial higher by enlisting the smartest people around - those who turn up at conferences like XP Day - to create a list of 100 off-the-wall ideas for improving the state of software development practice. The goal is a list of 100 ideas summarized in a title and a paragraph of text. Not all of these ideas will be good - indeed a lot of them are bound to be horrible. However, by generating a large number of candidates then relentlessly culling from the lot until only a few remaining gems shine out, I would be happy to extract at least one or two ideas worth developing further and with the potential to have impact on the community comparable to some of the ideas above.

To prime the pump we will use a process called "morphological analysis" or more informally the "Zwicky box". This process starts with a list of know products, breaks them down into component dimensions and "tags" each product with its placement along that dimension. New product ideas can be obtained by randomizing the resulting matrix.

This workshop will run in 90 minutes. It should have at least two or three trial runs before the conference, starting at Agile2009 in Chicago.