Return to the IMD Bubble

Today I had lunch back at IMD. Despite the fact that I was a student there are recently as two months ago, it seems very, very far removed. On campus I now feel like one of the myriad visitors that shuffles through each day. Oh well, at least there are still many smiling faces I know. :-)

I had lunch with three classmates--Ian, Mario, Joonwon--and Joonwon's wife; it was a fun mini-reunion. It was fun to catch up with all of them and hear about how their new jobs are going--especially Ian's as he now works directly for IMD! The food was, of course, delicious and plentiful--oh how I miss the IMD lunches. The best part may have been the ping pong, though. Apparently this year's class doesn't really play ping pong . . . wth?

In other exciting news, I took a break from my Silmarillion reading tonight to read up on Agile Development methodologies. Our team is already employing many of them--short iterations, frequent releases, ongoing communication, open layout, joint design sessions, etc--but I uncovered some other concepts that might be useful for us. I've always been vehemently against accepting a single development model as dogma. Every team, product, market, technology, and set of stakeholders has its own unique requirements and it is crucial to address them, not just blindly apply some model. However, in Poken's case the rapid growth of the market, small size of the team, and constant evolution of product requirements all go nicely with a very agile process.