I had the good fortune to attend Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City, where I got to help Liz Keogh run her deliberate discovery workshop. She is brilliant and had a few evil tricks up her sleeve for the workshop, and I think the attendees came away from it excited to dig deeper. I know I’m going to be experimenting more and more with deliberate discovery in the coming months.

The rest of the conference was pretty great. AgileConf is a weird one for me because it’s so damn big. It’s an industry conference, not a community conference. The exhibit hall is insane (largely due to the sheer amount of shitty-looking project management software on offer). But the catered lunches were delicious (the Grand America Hotel in SLC has amaaaaazing bread pudding), and people that woke up early enough told me that the breakfasts were too.

There were a lot of great sessions, but my favorite had to be Elizabeth Hendrickson’s tutorial workshop on Exploratory Testing. I walked in to find people hunched over electronic Scrabble games, and Elisabeth had written a test charter to guide people on how to explore them. I didn’t write it down but it was something like “Explore electronic scrabble with the stuff in the box to discover how it works.” In the next round we learned to be more systematic in what to look for, like how to identify variables in the system under test. We didn’t get to do the third round because we spent a good amount of time in conversation between rounds. Elisabeth is extremely knowledgeable and was able to handle any question that people threw at her, and I also love that she invites other people from the audience to answer. She’s great at imparting the information, but also amazing at turning it into a comfortable conversation rather than it feeling like a formal classroom setting.

I also enjoyed @hackerchick’s talk on Lean Startup and Agile. If you’ve read any of the books or articles on Lean Startup, you probably knew most of what she was talking about. But she covered the gamut for people who aren’t all that familiar, and brought stories and excitement to the table to boot.

As always, the best part of the conference was meeting people. I got to hang out with my ADDcasts partner-in-crime, Dave Brady, and we recorded an episode with Michael Feathers. We also kicked back in high-back chairs and pair programming Smalltalk on a 12-foot projector. Good times. I got to meet Tim Ottinger who told me about his experiences watching the internet unfold before his eyes. It was also great fun meeting ADDcasts listeners like Colin Jones and David Adsit. And of course there was that time when I sat down next to Gary Bernhardt for 10 seconds and got up to grab food and look for Gary Bernhardt.

AgileConf is huge, which brings a bunch of lame stuff but also draws a huge number of super awesome people in. I’m looking forward to next year, and I’ll definitely track down folks that I didn’t manage to meet this year.