Last week I went to Agile Grenoble Conference. The whole day was of very good quality. I was lucky with my choice of sessions and shared my day between good discussions and great talks.

My menu was:
– Kanban by Romain Couturier
– Testing and refactoring legacy code by Sandro Mancuso
– Functional Programming by Neil Ford
– TDD by Michael Borde
– Angular + Jersey by Laurent Leseigneur and Olivier Cuenot

All of them were very interesting but I was really bluffed by Sandro’s performance.
His slides can be seen here (with video at the very last slide):

That is really the kind of session I am looking for:
1) just a couple of main messages (“testing from shortest branch, refactoring from deepest one) during 5 minutes
2) live coding with some best practices, tips and personal opinions
And this was also very motivating to become more fluent with an IDE as part of the performance was the advanced usage of Eclipse, which for a Java developer is a real add-on.

Before the keynote of the afternoon, organizers found a great way to read the whole 12 principles of the Agile manifesto to the full audience of the conference. Strangely enough, I think it was the first time I heard the 12 principles read totally during the conference after 5 editions. The idea was that every person in the room had received a cup with 3 sentences from the manifesto. When our sentences were read, we got to sit. After the 12, a group of 10 people remained standing and they had to go on stage to read the sentence they had on their cup. Those were fake sentences like “company result is the primary measure of progress”. Very clever game!

This year I was a full visitor: I was neither organizing nor presenting. So thanks to all the contributors of this great day and I hope to give a help one way or another next year!