I’m sitting in the Toronto airport on the way home, wrapping up the week at Agile 2008. I’m leaving a day early so I won’t see Thursday afternoon or Friday morning sessions, but I did see enough to form some opinions on the state of Agile:

Is Bigger Better? - I heard there were 1,525 people registered for the conference and it sure seemed like it. What a big conference. The agile community continues to grow and become more mainstream, but I’m not so sure this is a good thing. I think things are getting watered-down for appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Tool Guys - The two title sponsors were tool vendors and I’d bet half the other sponsors were selling tools as well. I guess this is inevitable but it’s a bit sad. Lots of people looking for shiny new things that I’m not convinced really help that much.
Too Many Sessions - There were 12 session slots over 4 days, so an average of 3 session slots per day. Most session slots had 44 tracks which was way too many. Some sessions had 1 or 2 people. I’m not sure Agile 2008 turned away anyone who proposed a session. I wish next year they’d cut the number of sessions way back, maybe in half, and keep the better sessions so each one had better attendance.
Overexposed Rock Stars - The Agile celebrities continue to dominate. I was told that there was a limit to 4 sessions per speaker and some of the brand names took full advantage of this. Maybe it’s a bit of sour grapes on my part, but it seems the folks who have books and seemingly present at conferences for a living should maybe be limited to 2 or 3 sessions and let others get a bit more exposure. But I’m sure the leadership in the agile industry have little incentive to change things, seeing as how selling books and classes is how they earn a living.
Lack of Engineering - There’s still a real lack of engineering focus at this conference. Too much code-level, not enough systems engineering level talks. There must have been two dozen TDD talks and lots of code-level stuff, but I’d bet there’s less than a handful of talks about engineering systems using agile. Scott Ambler had a good talk about getting started on Kicking Off Agile Projects and Mary Poppendieck and Michael Nygard had a good talk on Complex Systems. These were refreshing yet sadly too few and far between. This gives me hope that my Agile Engineering talks will present some fresh ideas for the community, but talking about engineering robust systems is definitely not mainstream.

Overall Agile 2008 for me was good in some respects (meeting people, hearing some interesting sessions), but on the whole I can’t say I was blown away. Maybe that’s just me being a bit cynical, but I think there’s something lost with something gained.