It’s simple: iLean’s Agile Kitchen is about Agile and people! Several times a year we gather around one or more Agile topics for interactive learning sessions and knowledge sharing. Check out the different sessions below:
Date
22
&
September
2026
18:00 - 22:00
Location
De Cronos Groep HQ
Veldkant 33a, 2550 Kontich
Language
Dutch
An interactive evening
Agile Kitchen is iLean’s free, quarterly community event for people who care about Agile in practice – not just in theory.
Each edition dives into a real-world topic that Agile teams wrestle with every day: from team dynamics and product decisions to leadership challenges and organisational change. You won’t find lectures or sales pitches here – just thoughtful, hands-on sessions where practitioners share what works (and what doesn’t) in their context.
Apollo put twelve people on the moon in three and a half years, and then it stopped. We're still trying to get back, and it turns out the hard part was never the rockets. The engineers retired. The suppliers closed. The blueprints survived, but the thousand small judgments that made them work were never written down. At the time, everybody simply knew them.
That's what losing knowledge looks like. No decision, no disaster. Just a slow drain you don't notice until you try to do the thing again and find you can't.
Now look at your own team. All the buzzwords are still there: pair programming, test-driven development, refactoring and continuous integration. People sit in open-plan offices wearing headphones 90% of the time. Tests that were supposed to design the code are written afterwards, if there's time. Technical debt is spinning out of control. Refactoring sprints anyone? Senior developers write comments on pull requests, thinking that this is what coaching others is all about.
Extreme Programming gave our industry a set of practices that made genuinely good software possible, and we're quietly forgetting them while still using their words.
XP is an Agile approach from the late 1990s, born around the same time as Scrum. The difference is worth knowing: Scrum describes how a team organizes its work, XP describes how a team actually builds the software. Short cycles, and a handful of practices that keep the code healthy enough to keep changing it: pair programming, test-driven development, continuous integration, refactoring, small releases.
Together they answer a question Scrum never really addresses: what does it take for a team to still be able to change direction in year three?
Agile Kitchen is our quarterly gathering, where you can reflect, recharge, and enjoy meaningful conversations. Bring your curiosity, and leave feeling inspired and eager to try something new.
Jan Van Ryswyck takes us back to where XP came from, what problems it was actually built to solve, and what each of its core practices was really meant to do. Not as history for its own sake, but so you can recognize the watered-down version when you're living inside it.
A real understanding of XP pays dividends for the rest of your career, whether you build software or help teams build it well. This session gets you started.
True to the Agile Kitchen spirit, this is a session with room to talk back. Jan brings two decades of hands-on practice rather than a slide deck of theory.
Jan Van Ryswyck has been a professional software developer since 2000 and writing about it since 2005. He is a technical coach specialized in XP practices, the author of Writing Maintainable Unit Tests, and the curator of the Awesome Talks list.
Jan has spent years working on test strategy inside organizations like Cegeka and many more. He speaks regularly at conferences including DDD Europe and Full Stack Europe. Jan is someone who has actually done the work, on real codebases, with real teams and real deadlines.
His goal as a software craftsman is: simple, high-quality solutions to complex business problems. Sharing what he has learned along the way is a close second.
€ 0
excl. VAT
Early bird promotion
Jan Van Ryswyck
Founder and Coach, Principle-IT
36
seats left
Agile Kitchen is built for agile coaches, team leads, change agents, and developers who work with software teams every day.
No technical background needed. If you work with developers, you'll follow.
If you want honest conversations instead of polished success stories, and practical ideas.
We run this training in-house too, tailored to your team and context.
