Colombo Agile Conference: The 1st Agile Conference in Sri Lanka

The First Ever Agile Conference, the next phase of the Agile Camp was held on the 23^rd of January 2012 at BMICH. This event was facilitated by 99X Technology along with the Sri Lankan Agile Community. The event featured two foreign guest speakers who entail a wealth of knowledge in Agile practices and methodologies along with some of Sri Lankan Agile practitioners.

The objective of the Agile Conference was to bring together leading international and local Agile practitioners to share their knowledge and experience within the IT community of Sri Lanka, so that they in turn could provide their customers with higher quality products and services. The audience comprised of over 200 individuals from a range of local IT organizations.   

The program kicked off with the much anticipated keynote on “Agile Attitudes & Abilities” highlighting factors which would make or break an Agile team delivered by Ilan Goldstein, Director, AxisAgile, a globally recognized certified Scrum Trainer and Project Management Professional with over 7 years experience. The other keynote on “Agile Metrics” depicted how Agile methodologies could be measured, presented by Colin Tan who is also a Director at AxisAgile; he is also a globally recognized Scrum Master & Scrum Product owner.

Sharing the limelight with the foreign speakers were our very own Agile experts who were namely Rukshan Jayaratne, Chief Operations Officer-Eyepax Consulting; Sameer Hamzah, Operations & Applications Support Manager-Pearson Lanka; Hasith Yaggahawita, Technology Manager -99X Technology; Samisa Abayaratne, Vice President  (Engineering) -WSO_2; Janith Gunasekara, Quality Assurance Lead -99X Technology, Buddhinatha Wijewantha, Senior Project Manager-99X Technology; Shehani Seneviratne, Process & Delivery Manager -99X Technology; Mahesu Nithokumar, Associate Architect – Technology- Virtusa; and Shehan Samarasinghe, Agile Coach – IFS.

The panel at the Colombo Agile Conference focused on the various methods which organizations could adopt Agile to enhance their business operations. Topics such as, how HR should be structured to facilitate Agile, the role of IT operations in an Agile environment, achieving quality whilst practicing Agile, necessary steps needed to embrace Agile as a company, Scrum a cure or bane?, Agile Architecture, and complete middleware stack with lean processes were some of the most sought after knowledge areas at the conference.

The organizing committee was overwhelmed by the feedback of the participants; they were indeed very glad about the initiative taken by the Colombo Agile community to educate the local community about these international practices and were thankful to the sponsors of the event to put up a conference of this magnitude for the first time in Sri Lanka.