Intridea - Leaders in Agile Software Development

This year the Agile 2007 Conference was held in Washington DC, our home town. We presented two workshops on Rails and Agile. Since we talked about movie making , we thought we shoot a quick marketing video for Intridea. We created "Agile vs Waterfall" video, a spoof on Apple's famous "Mac vs PC" commercial. We submitted the video to Google's YouTube video contest. The video won third place. It was shown to an audience of 1200 attendees at the Google Party and the Conference Banquet.

Facts behind the video

1. The child actors are BoySonic, 9 and ViqVegas, 5. ViqVegas can't read so he had to memorize all the lines and technical jargon.
   
   
2. The total budget was two M&M chocolate packs.
   
   
3. The script, the shoot, and the edit took about 6 hours in total.
   
   
4. The videos received about 2500 views.
   
   

Ok, I am not quite ready to quit my day job to go into the movie business.

The script:

Hi I am agile...

[waterfall: wearing a yellow rain jacket...]
[agile: wearing brown intridea tee shirt and blue jeans]

agile: hi i am agile
waterfall: i am waterfall

agile: what are you doing there waterfall?
waterfall: we just got a new project, I am going through the contract [flips through a stack of papers], you can never be too careful…

agile: really, i just started new project with my customer, we made some sketches on the white board... and we came up with a quick prototype

pulls out a hand drill, brrr, brrr
agile: What's that…
waterfall: Oh, its our requirements tool, its pretty neat, you can drill down 12 levels deep. It automatically generates three binders so we can be CMM Level One Certified.

agile: that sounds like fun…
agile: what's are you doing now?

waterfall: just a little planning. we have three development teams. We should have the initial design in four months, three days, and 14 minutes. It used to take us six months...

agile: that's pretty good planning, we build software in short cycles, so we can learn and adapt...
Waterfall: ok i have to go now, i need a meeting to plan our meetings...

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.