More agile cowbell at Serena TAG


I just returned from Serena's annual user conference called "TAG". The "TAG" is a bit of play on words. Its a mixture of TAG as in an XML TAG and TAG as in graffiti. The conference had both great content and production quality.

The highlight for me was the unveiling of Serena Agile On Demand (AOD). AOD is a SaaS offering that enables agile development at the enterprise scale. I gave a couple main stage demonstrations of the new product, and we had several conference presentations on agile development. Part of our AOD offering includes transformational services that will be delivered by Valtech. My favorite main stage session was Agile Mythbusters. This was a tongue and cheek panel discussion that was MC'd by Jeff McKenna Serena's Chief Agile Evangelist and another co-creator of the Scrum agile method. Jeff presented 10 Agile myths that were debated by the panelists. The panelists were Al Goerner (Valtech), Tim Walker (Valtech), Paul Dupey (Serena) and me. It was good fun, but I hope the video never makes it up to YouTube as there were several career limiting comments made by the panelists. An example of the TAG'ing that was done for the Mythbusters session can be found here on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHqflM1sM-w&feature=email).


So, what’s all this about "More Cowbell"? Well first you have to read this on Wikipedia. In a past life at a startup, my development team was complaining about their under-powered hardware (Have you ever worked at a small software company where the developers didn't complain about their hardware?). The sarcastic, wise-cracking bunch morphed this request into a relentless quest for "More Cowbell". We'll they eventually got their hardware. And they got their cowbell too. We started the ritual of kicking off our daily scrum standups by ringing a cowbell.


At Serena TAG, we have attempted to propagate this tradition by distributing cowbells to all 1000 attendees!





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