Dr. Ahmed Sidky in .NetWork.org gathering.

Today I attended a great session presented by Dr. Ahmed Sidky entitled "Introduction to Agile Development" and organized by the great group .NetWork.org. I heard about Dr. Ahmed before but never met him in person, from his session I can tell he has a great personality and a lot of passion about Agile and introducing it to Egypt. I also liked the growing interest about Agile methodologies in Egypt. Here are my notes from the session:

• Dr. Ahmed will have his book Becoming Agile published soon.
  
• Agile is a new way of thinking for making software, so minds need to be reformatted first :).
  
• Agile is common-sense but collected and written in a formal form.
  
• I especially liked the introduction case if the customer has only enough money to pay for one day of work, what is the best thing we can do? Of course a small working product of the highest value features to the customer, not a prototype or a design document.
• Then we discussed the differences between defined process and empirical process and why software development is considered an empirical process.
  
• Another point I liked is explaining why people fight changes, simply because the more time spent doing something the more attached to it, that's why Agile encourage shorter iterations.
• Then came the point I totally agree with Dr. Ahmed in, that is no matter what practices you are doing or what process you are following, without everyone in the team is fully understands the values and principles of Agile you will not be completely agile. I personally experienced this in my work and that's way I'm doing more Agile training to my team.
• We are “Value Providers”.

From the after-session discussion I noticed that a lot of people need more information about Agile to start working. So here are some of the links I found useful for me while learning and I hope they be helpful for you to:

• agilealliance.org resources section, you will find a lot for papers and presentations to start with.
• All-About-Agile blog, especially 10 key principles of agile software development and how to implement Scrum in 10 easy steps.

My personal advice is to first make sure everyone understands the Agile values and principals then start with Scrum because it is easier to follow in conjunction with whatever development methods you are using right now and then you can add more practices later.

Overall the day was great and I met very interesting people, I hope I see more and more progress in the Agile community in Egypt.