I recently gave a presentation on an Introduction to Agile Methodologies. Unfortunately, I only have the presentation, and not the audio narration that goes with the presentation. Therefore a few of the slides might not make sense taken out of context from the narration. Here is the presentation:

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This is the intro to agile presentation from Agile Chennai 2007. It was done jointly by Bala and myself, although Bala did most of it. I just spoke for five minutes at the end of slide 83 about how agile is not a set of techniques.

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I gave a presentation at DCamp on the design of programmer spaces. With Agile processes emphasizing the social aspects of software development, this is a topic that has come into focus once more.

We spend a lot of time on improving productivity through better languages, tools and processes. How often do we look at the environment in which the team works? Cubicles are probably the worst environment for programmers because they are poor when you want peace and quiet to work alone and poor when you want to work collaboratively as a pair or group. In this talk we’ll look at some environmental factors that impact teams and how we can design better programmer spaces.

Resources

• The Ultimate Software Development Office Layout: Tons of good links
• The Psychology of Computer Programming: The first book to look at programming as a social activity. Published in 1971.
• IBM’s Santa Teresa Laboratory: A study on designing spaces for programmers while IBM was planning out the Santa Teresa Lab. This was done in the late 70s.
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams: Another classic book on programming as a human activity. First edition in 1987.
• Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game: Has a good discussion on programmer spaces, especially with regard to agile processes. Published 2006.

I would love to start a discussion on this. If you have any comments, do add them to the post below.

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