Agile Tooling Night (Utrecht, Netherlands. May 2014. Keynote)

On May 7 I will do the opening talk for an event on tooling in agile projects at Capgemini head offices in Leidsche Rijn, Utrecht. The title of this talk will be Individuals and interactions over proce$$e$ and fools.

The first statement in The Agile Manifesto clearly favors individuals, teams, interaction and collaboration over processes and tools. But there’s as there’s two sides of every story. When it comes to tools the Agile Manifesto is often misinterpreted in a sense that it is not allowed to use tooling in agile projects. Any tooling that is. On the other hand, more and more vendors are trying to jump the agile bandwagon and sell their tools as being the most agile toolset available. Agile has become big business.

The big question is of course how much tooling an agile team really needs. During this talk I will shine my light on the sense and nonsense of tools in the agile field. From post-its and brown-paper to wiki’s, agile dashboards, continuous integration and application lifecycle management. Let’s not forget: a fool with a tool is still a fool.