Agile development, a 1 on 1 with David Norton and a customer. In the last day of the conference we had a 1 on 1 with David Norton, research director at Gartner, specialised in application development and agile development in particular.

Invited by one of our challenging customers we spoke about adoption of scrum, the dynamics of distributed teams, refactoring principles and continuous release management. A few blinks:

- It takes on average 3 sprints to gel....so people becoming a team;
- On average, it takes 15 to 18 months to reach optimal cooperation in agile teams;
- A distributed team is an integrated team - to prevent the old waterfall throwing over the wall habit;
- Operations should participate in scrum teams;  
- Explicitly plan for refactoring on average about 20%;
- Invest in continuous quality management and delivery management tactics and tooling.

Good feedback from an analyst that sees half the world's Scrum initiatives.