Yesterday was an Agile Seminar day. Sponsored by Reaktor and F-Secure, this was the fourth Agile Seminar in Helsinki. We started back in the Spring of 2005 with a whopping 90+ people present and the rest of the seminars have been pulling three digit audiences.

Yesterday's seminar was actually the first where the attendance was lower than in previous seminars. I think it's fair to say that a large factor in that phenomenon was that the event was announced less than two weeks before the event!

Talking about the last responsible moment, eh? We also did next to zero "marketing" beyond the agilefinland Yahoo! group and word of mouth.

Well, regardless of the short notice, it was a triumph of "lean seminar organization" and we did pull a nice crowd of roughly 150 agilists into the HTC Helsinki conference center so our first speaker, Sampo Pasanen, Product Unit Director at Efecte Corporation, didn't have to talk to an empty auditorium.

The past couple of seminars have been slightly Scrum-oriented so this time we went for something a bit different. Sampo's presentation was about Efecte's use of agile methods to help their product business.

It wasn't completely different, though, because Efecte happens to be using Scrum. Oh, well.

Our second talk was something entirely new in terms of the Agile Seminars in Helsinki. We had Heimo Laukkanen, an architect from the University of Helsinki's IT governance department, talking about the relationship between agile methods and IT governance. That's something I'd bet most of us don't think about too often in our daily work but, nevertheless, it's an important function for larger organizations.

Our last speaker this time was Tom Gilb, the father of the Evo method (PDF) and the author of a gazillion papers on all things related to software engineering. Tom presented his thoughts on what's wrong with agile methods, focusing on the lack of quantification. He certainly managed to inspire a lot of discussion among the audience and afterwards over pizza and beer.

Overall, it was a good night. I was tired as hell but everything went quite smoothly and even the pouring rain couldn't bring down the atmosphere of our bi-annual get-together. Looking forward to the next time...