I got back from Malmö and the Øredev conference this Friday night, feeling quite tired after three days filled with lectures, of a varying levels of awesome. The conference focus was Efficiency, which of course fits very well with the stuff I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks. Now I have a lot more material to take into account when thinking of how to best implement Agile on an enterprise level.

I went to a lot of sessions focusing on different variations of Agile implementation, from small (5 people) to large (14.000 Nokia employees). I got some useful information on best practices and lessons learned, which will come in handy in my near future. This however, was still largely things I already have a fairly good theoretical knowledge of, so it was good to find some other session gems for me to attend.

For example I attended a session called the Pair Programming show, in which two coders aimed to present the benefits, and problems, associated with pair programming. The presentation was rocky at best, but the message was clear and strong and I found myself really thrilled about trying to incorporate pair programming into the every day culture of The Company. The benefits feel obvious, although I can see the difficulties in introducing a radically new way of working to a crowd of solo-oriented coders. A worthy challenge I guess, especially since I am not a coder mysel!

It is good that I had two coders with me during the whole conference so that they also got to experience all the interesting stuff, as well as me getting someone to discuss things that might be outside my “area of expertise” with.

Another concept that was frequently talked about during the conference was Time boxing, which isn’t a new concept but something that I feel that I should really look into more. So today I started using a variant of Time boxing called the Pomodoro Technique, in which you basically decide a task to work on, then set a timer for 25 minutes and only work on that task for the duration of the timer. After the 25 minutes are up you take a five minute break and then either continue with the task or select a new task. It feels awesome, since you focus intently on a single task for 25 minutes, and you hinder yourself from dragging stuff out, which I tend to do sometimes.

I am actually using this technique right now as I am writing this blog post. 25 minutes to write, read, correct and publish. Seems like a nice time box, and I won’t get to chance to start thinking too much about what I am doing. As soon as I am done writing this post I will select another task and do that for 25 minutes, and tomorrow I am going to try this at work. I am counting on it to allow me to perform wonders! :)