Intridea - Leaders in Agile Software Development

I just read Neil Davidson blog on learning lessons from Rodriguez's movie making. It's nice to see another fan with similar views.

I thought Neil's point about having a clear vision and script was dead-on! "He still had a script though. Most importantly, he had a clear idea of what the film was going to be..." We find that out team is the most productive when we have the visual design (wireframes, storyboards, and CSS) mostly done ahead of the implementation. Of course, we fine tune the design with the back-end software.

We will be helping out our friend Bob Payne at CodeGreenLabs at the Agile 2007 Conference. We will offer our rails and agile expertise to work on projects that make a difference in the world, benefiting organizations that are working to improve the environment, human rights, social justice, health and economic development. Come join us.

Dave, Matt, and I will be presenting a Rails/Agile workshop at the Agile 2007 Conference. The conference will be held in Washington DC, our home town. We are pretty excited.

Having fun with Rails and Agile Development

Agile software development brought fun back into building software by introducing light-weight approaches to team communications and customer collaboration. Delivering working software and learning new technologies made us happy. In spring of 2005, an open-source web application framework called Ruby on Rails (RoR) was introduced to minimize tedious aspects of web application development. This framework allows a developer to focus on application’s business logic, interact with customers frequently, and reduced the cost of changes. The Agile community quickly embraced the new framework as evidenced by one of the best selling technical books titled Agile Web Development with Rails (by Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, and Mike Clark). The RoR framework abandons traditional heavy-weight assumptions and encourages simple, creative interfaces. Good looking, easy-to-use applications make the users happy, which makes developers happy. In this workshop, we go beyond the buzz by interactively demonstrating key elements of Rails framework. Then, we will have a group discussion/debate on if (or how) this framework enables project teams to be more agile. We will end the workshop by improvisational development of features requested by the workshop participants.

My good friend David Kane and I will be presenting a workshop at the Agile 2007 Conference. This is a reprise of our 2006 workshop, which received rave reviews from the audience and the session chair. The workshop was both educational and entertaining (don't tell your boss). We will plan to have a mix of new and repeated film clips.

Checkout the wiki notes from last year.

Bob Payne, our mutual friend, interviewed us and posted the podcast here.

Making movies and software at the speed of thought!

Director Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids^TM, El Mariachi^TM, Sin City^TMis an Agile Director. He enjoys making highly creative movies quickly and cheaply. His ambition is to make movies at the speed of thought. To achieve this goal, he works in small teams to develop the ideas, visualize them quickly, shoot the movie fast, and build the movie in layers. This workshop will introduce Rodriguez's approach to filmmaking by screening several of his 10 minute flick school^TM featurettes and we will explore if and how these techniques translate to software development in a lively group discussion.

Highly recommended for DVD-extras junkies.