Here's my short (kind of) recap of the XP2006 conference that was held in Oulu, Finland this year. Before going any further, I'd like to thank the organizers and volunteers for a well-organized conference. The Reaktor team thanks you!

We arrived at the crime scene on Saturday and didn't stop having a great time at any time during the conference. It was fun, it was teaching, and it was revitalizing.

In addition to being Gold sponsors for this year's conference, we decided to revive the fine tradition of having conference t-shirts. There hasn't been a conference shirt at the XP conferences for a while and since we at Reaktor love good gear, we wanted to do something about it. And do it in style--here's Tom Poppendieck modeling our Scandinavian street wear design (come see us at the Milan Fashion Week next year...).

As you probably noticed if you were there, some people were also wearing a white Reaktor designed t-shirt featuring the code police. Pekka Abrahamsson, the programme chair, even announced keynote speakers wearing the code police shirt and our legendary I Love Servers trucker cap!

People thanked us many times for providing such cool t-shirts (and, to quote another conference delegate, a shirt that doesn't yell "I'M A GEEK" from a distance...) I really hope that our effort carries on to next year's conference in Lake Como, Italy.

Oh, and of course we had our beautiful ladies Kaisa and Miina handing out the shirts to make sure we don't have to carry a single one back! (and we didn't :)

This year, my participation involved an activity session and a couple of open space sessions (which this year's conference featured for the first time in its history). Just a few words of each of these.

The activity in question was the 3-hour at the conference on Tuesday afternoon together with Markus Hjort. The activity in question was the Coding Tournament which I blogged about before the conference.

We had advertised that participants could use either Java or Ruby, but we didn't quite finish the Ruby API in time for the session due to problems getting the built-in XML-RPC server running (it seems to have been a machine-specific issue). Most teams went for Java anyway, which wasn't a surprise. Geoff Bache, however, was there to try Ruby so I paired with him, having done some stuff with Ruby earlier in the year and being a Ruby fan in general. Also, J.B. Rainsberger stepped in and together we managed to whip up the necessary Ruby code for communicating with the game server over XML-RPC and to eventually to test-drive the actual bot stuff.

It turns out I wasn't much of a pair, though. Running the session for some 15 people with just two or three organizers (Pekka Enberg and Antti Mattila also helped us throughout the preparations and the session itself) meant that I had to run around a lot. Luckily, J.B. (whom I met in person for the first time in this conference, even though he's been kindly reviewing drafts of my book for over a year) was there and could pair with Geoff quite effectively, being a Rails convert himself.

We will submit the Coding Tournament to forthcoming conferences so if you missed the opportunity this time, don't fred. We'll also make the source code for the game server publicly available (probably at Laughing Panda). And speaking of forthcoming conferences, you are coming to XP Days Germany in November, aren't you?

We hosted the two open space sessions together with Bartek from Nokia Networks (that is, Nokia Siemens Networks after the recent merger) in Düsseldorf whose team I've visited a handful of times during the past year or so.

The first session was titled "Scaling Scrum" and drew some 15 people interested in talking about the ways Scrum can be effectively scaled up from a single team. The discussion revolved pretty much around a few people from Reaktor, Tecnomen, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sulake. Mike Cohn was there and not surprisingly had a lot of insights to share as well, having run Scrum projects of up to 100+ people.

The discussion was exactly what I am looking for in conferences and it was good to hear other people's observations and war stories on what has worked and what hasn't. Among the excellent notions that came up during the conversation was that "scaling Scrum" doesn't necessarily mean adding people. Splitting an existing team into two is also scaling--with many of the same problems one faces when scaling by adding a new team.

The other open space session I co-hosted (I mostly just participated since Bartek took care of introducing the topic and moderating the discussion) was titled "Leadership in Agile." Again, we had quite a good attendance and the people that showed up had a lot to say.

The discussion started off with some rather unexpected (in my opinion) disagreements. The fundamental issue seemed to be that not everyone understood the word "leadership" meaning the same thing. Specifically, "leadership" and "management" were considered synonyms by some, although personally I consider them being two wildly different things. In any case, plenty of discussion ensued from these disagreements and Bartek had his hands full keeping track of whose turn it was to get the speaking token.

Also, the session having taken place 11pm after the conference dinner and people drinking beer during the session may have had an effect on the style of argumentation that took place...

Again, I had a great time. I didn't attend as many sessions as last year but the conversations I had in the corridors more than made up for it. And it's always nice to connect with friends you haven't seen in a while--and to make new friends to learn from and share experiences with. As a matter of fact, I'll write down a note to self for ramping up some collaboration with our beloved neighbours in Sweden. It's only a ferry ride away from Helsinki but I've only met members of the Swedish Agile community in conferences like this one.

And, of course, the Exoftware guys are always a fun bunch to go out with. Here's a photo from the early morning brunch at the pier. We managed to attract some locals to join the fun as well...

You may have seen them already but there's a bunch of "official" photos online taken by Hubert Baumeister and Patricia Figueira. Also, you can find some random images by searching for "xp2006" in Flickr. Plus, Tom will sooner or later make his photos available for purchase on PopppsPhoto as usual.