Don’t you love it, when you’re sitting in a talk with a “this sounds vaguely interesting”-attitude and it turns out to be really inspiring? Happened to me at ALE 2011 with Bruce Scharlau‘s talk about “Agile at the University”. He presented the various ways, he teaches agile at Aberdeen and how all of us in attendance could help spread the word about agile methods.
Thinking back, I don’t recall ever having heard anything about agile development during university.* But it would be much easier to instill people with an agile mindset during their education than to have them unlearn “big design up front”-thinking when they start working. And agile study assignments would probably be more fun, too.
Bruce convinced me and I’ve already written to two universities offering a talk or guest lecture. Christoph will contact a third one.
If you’d also like to take action, record your efforts in this wiki. Who knows, in a few years time, we might all enjoy colleagues fresh from university that are already familiar with agile development 🙂
*For me the saving grace were several courses in human computer interaction, which contained the “Design – Implement – Analyze”-cycle. So when I left my alma mater I already thought that short iterations are a pretty neat idea.