Today was the first ever Techcamp event (co-organised by ASCI). Techcamp is an initiative taken by a bunch of Directians with the underlying thought of knowledge sharing and community building. The session was on Agile Development - How to approach Evolutionary Design by Dr. Venkat Subramanium - a very interesting speaker. It was an afternoon talk, held from 2 to 6. But there wasn’t a dull moment as he discussed the problems with the stereotypical approach to architecture and design, in contrast with the agile alternative. At Directi we are incorporating agile practices into our product development lifecycles. So we arrived at the venue with several questions.

Dr. Venkat made several interesting points. He stated that the design of a project must continue to evolve throughout it’s life. He spoke about how rapid prototyping and version control go hand in hand. He warned against the tendency to build extensible components without there being any present need for extensibility.

The only downside was the code session after tea. The Groovy code that he used contained concepts from dynamic languages which were not very common knowledge. As a result, not all of were able to follow the code very clearly, although we were able to catch the general import of his illustrations.

He had to catch a plane as soon as he concluded his talk. I wish that there had been some more time for interaction after the talk.