"Making Connections, Building Relationships" The Agile 2007 conference will be a major event. Now that Agile has matured as a methodology and is ready for a fuller evaluation and discusssion.

Agile 2007 gives attendees access to the latest thinking in this domain, and bridges communities that rarely get a proper chance to exchange ideas and thoughts.

http://www.agile2007.org/

From QA perspective this is a positive move, and QA are as guilty as anyone of simply pointing out faults/gaps in the methodology.  Testing can be an over-critical activity, and it is important for the test community to contribute to these methodologies in positive fashion. As Elisabeth Hendrickson noted astutely in her testobessed blog …

A troubling trend I have seen are process QA folks moving from policing traditional processes to calling themselves Agile Testers and policing Agile teams. This post is a good reminder to be aware of that, and to listen to the symptoms of process problems.

http://www.testobsessed.com/2006/11/17/why-agile-teams-dont-need-process-qa/

Agile is an umbrella for the newer methdologies: Agile, SCRUM & Extreme Programming. It represents the next generation of development, and this conference will attempt to be a debate on where Agile stands. There will be significant representation from the testing community, which is key. Testing approaches have has changed radically in the last few years in UK, and I believe the US are a couple of years ahead with these methodologies. To avoid the same pitfalls they have already encountered, I have found it enlightening, as most of the advances in QA thinking have been outside this country.