XP Day 2007: Brilliant!

Presenting an experience report while recovering from a bout of stomach bug: Interesting. I think I did well considering. The response was positive, with two pieces of negative or neutral feedback, but 17 positive. I presented this talk at Agile 2007 this year with my friends Shane and Rolf. We assumed that was it (we all binned our talk notes, which didn't help me), until Angela Martin kindly suggested that we submit it for this conference.

Top tip: if you present 3 person report without the other two people, rewrite slides so you know what it's really on about.

I'd never been to an XP Day before; I was very pleasantly surprised by the lovely people and the great sessions. Highlights for me were:

• Catching up with former colleagues, people from CITCON, and other conferences
  
• Being prepared to argue about Non Functional Requirements in Sally Ann Freudenberg's fishbowl, and having Nat Pryce and Keith Braithwaite argue most of what I wanted to say anyway.
• Duncan Pierce and Rachel Davies' standing-room-only session 'Cognitive Bias in Decision-making'
• The final session for the second day of the developer track was Steve Freeman's panel: 'Have we lost our Mojo?'. It was great to see so many notable people debating the state of the Agile community.

In summary: It's well worth attending.

I think the Mojo is behind the cushions on the sofa, anyhow.