So while I posted my criticism of the Agile 2009 program a few days ago, I thought I'd take a moment to comment on the trends that I see as encouraging and favorable.

Most of all I am delighted to see a stage dedicated to tools! :-D It seems that the elephant in the room has been unveiled! The Agile Manifesto taught us to despise tools and processes. Despite this, from the beginning agile development has been about tools and processes. They were just different tools and different processes from those that preceded them [in the 1990's.] So we went around saying tools and processes are bad, when what we meant was, your tools and processes are bad, our's are good! So :-p :-p :-p to you! (traditional, waterfall, SDLC, academic, big process, big design folks.)

So I see a full stage dedicated to tools as a real coming out for the community. Meanwhile, the type of tools I see being developed in our community are quite astounding. I'm a particular fan of JBehave and the work from the BDD community. So I'm looking forward to what else shows up on the tools stage.

So what else looks interesting?...

I'm particularly glad to see a user experience stage. I was, after all, the UX guy on the Singapore Project when FDD was born. And most of my early publishing was agile user experience material. I wish the abstract for this program was a little more specific and gave better guidance for submissions but regardless, it's good to see that user experience is getting a fair shake. It is so vital to the delivery of customer value. Technorati tag: Agile+2009, Agile+Chicago, Agile+Alliance, User+Experience, David+Anderson