Colombo Agile Conference 2014 a resounding success

7 July 2014 08:26 am Views - 28172

Sri Lanka’s largest gathering of ‘Agilists’ unfolded last month as the Colombo Agile Conference 2014, held for the second consecutive year, brought together over 400 IT professionals to dissect the latest trends and best practices in Agile software development – one of most popular development concepts in the world today.

With a stellar line-up of some of the world’s most renowned Agile experts coupled with local professionals in Agile methodology, the symposium proved to be incredibly useful to the participants as the speakers covered a diverse range of topics, sharing real-life examples in differing business environments and cutting-edge systems. These were followed by four highly technical tracks sessions during which conference-goers were given the chance to interact with the speakers.

The conference took place on 26 June at the Cinnamon Lakeside and was a highly successful follow-up to its predecessor in 2013. The flagship event of the Colombo Camps Community, the full-day event consisted of keynote speeches delivered by some of the international speakers in the morning. This was followed by technical tracks on ‘Agile QA’, ‘Dev Ops’, ‘Scrum Shortcuts’ and ‘Agile Metrics’ held parallely during which several Sri Lankan Agile practitioners presented their white papers.

“Agile is not a way of doing, it’s a way of doing better. It’s not about software – it’s about business success,” stated former Yahoo!Vice President of Product Development and GoodAgile CEO Pete Deemer in his keynote address, a message expounded throughout the conference.

The line-up of speakers also included Crisp Agile and Lean Coach Henrik Kniberg, AxisAgile and Scrum Australia Director Ilan Goldstein, GoodAgile CEO Pete Deemer, Evolve Beyond Managing Director and Scrum Foundation Co-Founder Gabrielle Benefield, Evolve Beyond CTO Robert Benefield andAxisAgile and Scrum Australia Director Colin Tan.

The local presenters represented several leading companies in Sri Lanka’s IT sector and consisted of 99X Technology Senior Quality Assurance Lead Janith Gunasekera, VirtusaSenior Consultant – Process Janani Liyanage, Netstarter Senior Delivery Manager Harsha Kapilarathna, 99X Technology Software Architect Samudra Kanankearachchi, IFS Lead Software Engineer and Agile Coach Hiruna Dissanayake, 99X Technology Senior QA Engineer – Test Automation Kishan Navaratne, Pearson Lanka Program Manager Rukshan Jayaratne and 99X Technology’s Technology Manager Hasith Yaggahavita.  

As in 2013, the participants of this year’s conference rated the conference highly and were very impressed by the calibre of the speakers as well as the content of the presentations. The organisers, the Colombo Camps Community, were praised, not only by participants but also the international speakers, for the initiative taken on by them to host such events in the country which benefit local IT professionals greatly.

The Colombo Camps Community is an independent community of software developers, with a common goal of improving the competencies of members of the Sri Lankan IT community. This concept of forming the community from technical personnel of the local IT industry, in an effort to bridge gaps prevalent in the IT sector in terms of knowledge and skills. This initiative is a collective attempt to place Sri Lanka on the global map as a hub for IT knowledge services.

The Colombo Agile Conference 2014 was sponsored by software product engineering company 99X Technology, Scrum Alliance, certified Scrum trainer GoodAgile, Tickets.lk as official ticketing partner, ReadMe.lk as digital media sponsor and was supported by the ICTA.