Today I attended first of two major software conferences that are happening this year in Poznan. I was interested mainly in project management and java paths so I can share some reflections only about those.

First things first – from organization side everything was very professional – good. Next thing that drew my attention was about people whom I noticed on java path – looked like mostly students – so where are those developers willing to increase their knowledge? shame on you, at work of course doing daily work, but this is also my more general and recent reflection about developers’ willingness to develop themselves – maybe some day I’ll write about it.

So getting back to actual content of conference, my conclusion is that it was very mixed, there were some good speeches and worse ones. On pm path I was actually slightly disappointed with level of knowledge about agile methods and scrum. I really thought that everybody is using it now. Some people were mentioning about using it or trying to use it but I could clearly see that approach on implementing scrum that was taken was more or less wrong. This is another subject to write about – but from my experience it’s clear – if you try to implement scrum only on development team level without getting higher to company management you will always fail. simply as it is. Otherwise most of the people seemed to be using heavy approaches, usually pmi promoted by guys from allegro, but strangest for me was one guy wondering how is it possible to run project without using ms project. Hey! this is so not 2010. but maybe it’s just my personal deviance that I would promote agile everywhere?

Anyway concluding – good conference, still many things to improve. Next there is Geecon in May , let’s see what happens there – this time almost all espeo guys are joining.