Colombo Agile Camp a grand success

The Colombo Agile Camp was successfully worked off recently with the participation of over 50 top practitioners of the Agile methodology in Sri Lanka. The program was a highly interactive and interesting one with many industry based scenarios around the agile methodology and practical issues being addressed in an open forum.

Colombo Agile Camp (www.colomboagilecamp.com) is an independent community founded by dedicated IT professionals in an effort to improve the competency and professionalism of the Sri Lankan IT industry. The Colombo Agile Camp community focuses on increasing awareness on Agile software development methodologies locally, as well as creating an active community which openly discusses and shares their ideas and issues.

The guest speaker for the event was Xtra Personell, Norway Chief Information Officer Christian Willoch having over 15 years of industry experience, with a special focus on process analysis, systems and infrastructure strategy. Willoch has a multicultural background growing up as a missionary’s child in South America and this exposure has made him adopt a somewhat different approach when outsourcing systems development to Sri Lanka during the past five years. He is also a certified Scrum Product Owner with focus on distributed teams.

The event organisers reached out to Sri Lankan IT professionals through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and a newly created Colombo Agile Camp discussion forum LinkedIn – the world’s largest professional network with over 135 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. More than 500 IT professionals expressed their willingness to attend the event. Out of this, 50 of the very best were chosen to participate at the event free of charge, while nearly 100 others watched the live streaming of the program via the internet.

The event received excellent feedback from all participants and one participant commented “Being a participant in the Agile Camp is one of the greatest opportunities I had in my career. Having face to face discussions with a leading agile product owner as well as with well known professionals in the Sri Lankan IT field, helped in enhancing my knowledge significantly.”

The event was jointly sponsored by 99X Technology and Xtra Personnell. 99X Technology is a software product engineering company specialising in delivering High Quality, High-End software services for the global market while Xtra Personnel is a major staffing services company based in Norway.  (Some basic information on what the Agile Methodology is can be found at http://www.allinterview.com/showanswers/35480.html)