We’re giving a talk about ‘how to talk to your boss about agile‘ for the Irish .Net Developers Association next Tuesday in Buswells hotel Dublin.

More details (including the slides themselves, as a preview of what you are missing) are available here in powerpoint, openoffice, pdf and flash formats. The slides explain how 4 pictures of bridges can explain the difference between Ad-Hoc , Predictive, Agile and XP projects. No , really , you do want to check this out.

Links to a lot of the sites / articles / tools used in the presentation are here on Del.icio.us. More posts on this blog about using agile techniques on projects are here.

The Bridges are:

• Old Drogheda Bridge from the 1200’s – Quick and Dirty or Ad-Hoc project. Got the job done , and fast . Was patched a load of times, but eventually fell down under the weight of the traffic.
• New Drogheda Motorway Bridge – Predictive Projects. Very easy to specify what you want (I want a bridge going from A-B to carry a motorway) and very easy to know when you are finished.
• Drogheda Railway Brigde – Agile. Once the longest Iron Girder bridge in the world.Built in the 1850’s and the spec has kept on changing since. This included a complete rebuild in 1925 without losing a single days traffic. How’s that for unit testing?
• Bungee Jumping off bridge in Queenstown – Extreme Programming (XP). Great fun if you’re doing it (and can be pretty effective), but scary for anybody watching.

As a sample of some of the pictures (which include lego people showing everything that can go wrong on a team), check out the image below.

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Image from
TheBrickTestament.