October 10th meeting: Introducing DSDM by Alan Airth

I'm pleased to announce that the next AgileScotland meeting will be an introduction to Britian's very own agile method, DSDM, by Alan Airth, on the 10th of October at 7:30 in Currie and Brown's offices.

I discovered DSDM in 2000 when I borrowed a colleages training manual for something to read in my lunch break. It was a revelation: the book was suggesting we do all sorts of clever things that I'd heard about at university (iterative development, prioritised requirements, timeboxes) but I didn't realise people actually did in real life. It seemed like I'd just joined a very switched on company. Of course, it was an illussion: lots of people had done the DSDM training but no teams were practicing it. I asked around my colleagues and they told me that although the ideas sounded good in theory, were too hard in practice.

Sound familiar? We hear a lot of the same thing about XP and Scrum from our less enlightened "Waterfall" colleagues. But sadly, our own Agile community is quite fragmented and tribal, despite having more in common points than differences. I've noticed that a lot of (but not all) XPers don't like DSDM - some even say it isn't agile - so I've asked Alan to spend some time contrasting DSDM and XP. In fact, he's given me a thought-provoking paper from a recent conference that does just this and I'd encourage you all to read it before the meeting. It's a very quick 2 pages.

I hope we might all learn something from this meeting.