Last Monday and Tuesday was really important to me, because I gave my first talks in front of an international audience. I was at the Software Passion Summit 2012 conference in Göteborg, Sweden where I was talking about how to measure and manage software development projects and how to make improvement steps in software maintenance projects. Both talks went very well, and I even got the large keynote room for my maintenance related presentation instead of the smaller room where I talked about measurements. The audience was really great, I got good feedback and questions. Thank you for coming and listening! Here are my slides:
I was really surprised by the high number of Windows and .NET related talks, but it turned out that Sweden has a very large Windows and .NET community, so they weren’t surprised at all. Frankly, I didn’t have any interest in these topics, but I did decide that earlier this year I would learn new things, so I mostly listened to mobile and web development talks. I saw very good techniques about how to develop for mobile platform and how to reuse existing components in web and mobile applications, but I got the impression that these didn’t matter much.
The user experience and fast reaction time are the most important things in the industry at the moment. If the user interface of an application is ugly and hard to use, or the company cannot come out with new features and fixes in a reasonable time, then customers will use the product of a different company. There’s nothing new here, but while earlier there was only the PC and a couple of companies developing applications for it, now there are more than 3 billion mobile phones in the world and countless companies and products. Being slow and ugly is like a death sentence.
I was really happy to see that speakers talked about the product and value and not about methodologies and techniques. Nobody - at least nobody I was listening to - wanted to sell Scrum or Kanban, because these don’t matter. The goal is to deliver usable product and not to implement a methodology.
My next public speaking event will be at ACCU 2012, where I’m going to talk about leadership techniques. See you there!
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