I am in Hyderabad, India, for the second time this year, teaching a group of very talented locals. Their task will be to teach the same content as I am re-visiting with them this week. Teach-the-teacher, I suppose.

Well, I mentioned RINO to the group today (RUP-In-Name-Only if you didn't already know) and after a bit of an explanation most of them recognised the unpleasant "beast". 

In fact, they got so interested in how RINO can be "hunted-down" that, after a 30-minute diversion from the course, I am now in-demand to repeat the "Hunting RINO to Extinction" presentation from the IBM Rational Software Conference of last week in London.

Unfortunately I will be without my presenting partner Arun "Zach" Zachariah, for this audience at Capgemini's University event,  but I am sure that the messages and the gags will still come across. ;-)

Julian

Yet again I have found that my clients are referring to an article that I wrote with Joshua, Mark and Scott Ambler for IBM developerWorks in early 2008.

Agile RUP - Experiences from the trenches was written in response to what we saw as a "knee-jerk" reaction away from RUP toward a nirvana of Agile approaches that seemed to suggest that RUP was no longer a  suitable approach.

More recently, there has been a lot of talk about the relevance of mature software practices being used in the context of an Agile approach. See the latest writings of Ken Schwaber on his new Scrum.org site.

So perhaps our article was "on the button" over 18-months ago, and that Agile RUP was a suitable reality for many organisations. I know that my clients agree, so perhaps more people should be thinking about the value of an aligned RUP and Agile approach.

After all, and I am sure you have heard it said before, "RUP-done-right was always Agile, and that RUP-done-wrong was always wrong."

So, Scott joined me on Monday to help visit a client and to participate in my UK Rational User Group (RUG) meeting.  Both were challenges, for different reasons, but I think we got the right messages across...

What a week!

Just made it back home to the UK, bad flight, very little sleep, but I am really buzzing about the conference and the opportunities for UPMentors.

There was a lot of talk about Agility@Scale, MCIF, Jazz and RTC. No real surprises there, but adoption is still developing.

The Agile panel, with Mark's contribution, was excellent. (How did Scott stay so quiet?)

It was also excellent to catch up with so many IBM friends, both old and new. Best regards to you all!

So now it's back to reality, applying these new insights & solutions, and maintaining my customers' momentum.

Here's to next year!
Julian 

Just in time for RSC 2009, we have a new Joomla!-enabled web-site.

There's a new city-scape, closely aligned with our home-towns, and far more useful content about us, our services, and the events we are involved in.

May thanks to Black Pepper for helping us in this conversion, we highly recommend them!

Julian