concocting  extraordinary  teams

January 06, 2007

Qcon: for better software team performance

Professional development has many facets: reading books, keeping up to date with news and journals, and working with colleagues to learn from one another. In the field of IT, we need to keep up-to-date and fresh.

InfoQ and JAOO have joined to offer another resource: the Qcon conference. The first edition will be held this spring in London, UK, and includes two tracks of interest to practitioners of Agile approaches. Agile Foundations is for teams just starting out. The other track, combining lectures and an all-day Open Space event, is called The Agile Journey - How do we Reach Mastery? and targets more advanced practitioners, though novices are welcome.

I'll be hosting these two tracks, and I've just finalized the lineup. I'm pretty excited about the event: there are talks for both technicians and managers, and the Open Space event will be led by Diana Larsen, who will also present a one day tutorial for leaders: Moving from Management that Controls to Management that Facilitates. Steve Freeman, winner of the 2006 Gordon Pask award for Contribution to Agile Practice will speak twice on testing, and Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum will share lessons learned implementing Scrum at Google.

If you'll be in Europe this spring, join us for a customized 3, 4 or 5-day Enterprise Software event. Pick the tracks that scratch where you itch: Meet the experts, work directly with them in Open Space, and enjoy the good food and social events of this new conference with us!

Further details about Agile tracks are outlined in this InfoQ news post.