The first talk I attended on Wednesday was Chris Armstrong's presentation on Agile Enterprise Architecture. I'm going to have to be honest - he started with a 10 minute rehashing of the Agile Manifesto, in his own thinking, and for me it went down hill from there. He is one of those delusional folks that thinks RUP can be Agile (anything with distinct phases for the different activities (requirements/design/coding/testing) is NOT agile). I just couldn't get over the fundamental difference there, and his constant reference to such BIG PROCESS things like TOGAF and IEEE processes didn't help. For an old-school architect, what he was saying was indeed agile, but it wasn't the kind of agile I was expecting. My friend and coworker Jim Patula (no blog) found him to be a half-way decent, so it could just be me.

There were two useful points he made, that I agree with completely - Agile is about minimizing rework (probably more than just that - what about other wastes, but a good thing to keep in mind all the same), and "At the end of the day, Microsoft Project doesn't work".