I recently sat in on part of ABC's two-day Digital Media Developer Summit.

Lex Sisney, CEO of ELC, which we teamed up with with for development and training, spoke about Agile and Iterative development, open source and how they could fit into ABC's developer stack.

Lex touched on three trends:

1) Success of agile/iterative project management
2) Emergence of developer friendly programming languages (specifically Ruby)
3) Commoditization of hosting (Amazon Web Services)

I spoke about how the ESPN Community Group utilizes these three trends for our development process. Oh, ESPN and ABC are part of Disney, which is why I got the invite in the first place.

We got a great reception from the various developers and managers there, which was great. These folks use the same proprietary technology and project management methods we used to use and I got the impression there is a lot of excitement for trying new technologies, methods and hosting solutions.

One of the best questions was what are the fringe benefits we've enjoyed from using all open source methods and technologies. As a manager and developer, I have noticed several:

1) Greater number of applicants for positions
2) Developers acquire skills more quickly
3) Developers acquire a much broader range of skills
4) Developers are more eager to improve their knowledge and skills (because they are acquiring marketable assets)
5) We have become part of a much larger community. Both in terms of taking and giving, we are active in the community through code sharing, Google Groups and much more.

Another great question regarded the combination of Test Driven Development, Agile Development and Ruby on Rails and if they can be separated.

I think Lex answered this best by saying TDD and Agile are methods and RoR is a great tool to use with these methods.

But it is interesting because Agile and TDD almost go hand-in-hand with Rails because the stack is so conducive to those methods that developers would almost have to fight against the methods NOT to use them with Rails.

Any language or stack (especially MVC stacks) can utilize TDD and Agile as processes, but both were baked in with Rails.

I can't think of any reason why that's bad, but I'd be interested to hear arguments on negatives to that.

The last big theme that I tried to stress is that we are not forcing or trying to force any one to adopt our methods or technologies, but merely present that, even in a large company with established methods and technologies, change still can happen, and languages, methods and hosting can be chosen to fit a particular application or product.

For example, I said that moving from Java to Ruby to do the heavy SAX-based parsing of statistical data feeds probably wouldn't be the best idea, but Ruby may be a much better solution for building a new social network.

So I am very glad Lex and got to share knowledge with developers from another part of the community. I hope the company as a whole embraces different solutions, so we can move beyond boundaries created by a particular technology and join a very smart and open community.