At CCSC-CP 2008, the keynote speaker was Robert Martin, the president/CEO of Object Mentor, Inc, as well as author of a numerous books and articles. The main thrust of his talk was that code needs to be developed in an agile manner with testing to be the forefront activity. This was motivated by stories of “rotten code” that is typically solved by management’s response to the developers “beating the drums of redesign”. Martin has been in the software business a good while and has had considerable exposure to software projects of, what my guess would be, almost all varieties. So, certainly, he speaks from experience.
By the end of his presentation, though, I personally didn’t feel that I had learned much or heard anything that I haven’t heard or read before. In fact, I would say that there wasn’t much Martin offered that couldn’t be found in books that have been stocked by most Borders for years. The theatrics of a seasoned speaker aside*, his address seemed to be received very well by many in the audience. I would assume that students found his content novel or perhaps at least an independent validation of what they were exposed to in their classes (oddly, though, the students in attendance of such events are probably not the ones that need the validation).
But why would the professionals in the audience derive so much pleasure from the talk? I would hope that they found nothing groundbreaking in his message given the content consisted of mainstream topics that have been around for roughly a decade. It must be the presentation style.
So what makes a successful conference keynote? It seems that you need to either provide the audience with information they find novel and relevant or you need to find a way to resonate. Success in the latter approach seems to be the conference equivalent of a Sunday sermon.