The Agile Decade has seen major changes in the social and technical practices of software. These have been inspired by a community of thought leaders whose shared passion, although having different social and technical agendas, worked together in partnership through the Agile Alliance to implement the Agile Manifesto. The values and the passion of the early revolutionaries reached business leaders who moved to embrace Agile and the revolution transitioned to a business evolution of major proportions.
However, in celebrating in our successes we risk stifling our future and those who have placed their trust in Agile to really make a sustainable difference. Unless we believe that Agile is over, having past its 10 year half-life, we need to take a critical look at where we are and where we need to go. We can only get better if we learn from our failures. We also need to embrace experiences and practices outside our community as it has been defined today. We cannot just dismiss critics; we need to have honest, realistic and actionable responses. Hence in this talk I will take a pragmatic retrospective look at the decade and highlight some of the challenges and opportunities ahead of us.
Agile software development has had more of an influence and has become more widespread than any early practitioner could have imagined. Yet some still call agile a failure. They point to the fact that few teams have achieved the 10x productivity or quality gains that the best agile teams have shown us are possible. They rightly state that partial, half-hearted agile implementations are common. These are real obstacles, yes. But evidence of failure? No.
Success with agile development is not binary. No teams are perfect⎯few have achieved the full benefits of being agile⎯but most who have begun the journey to embrace agile are better than they were. We succeed by iterating toward becoming more and more agile. Join me as we explore the five stages of the ADAPT model, a sustainable approach for both getting started with and getting better at agile. By creating Awareness, increasing Desire, developing Ability, Promoting successes, and Transferring the implications of being agile to the rest of the organization (ADAPT), we not only become progressively more agile, we also create a solid foundation on which to continue the industry-wide march toward continued organizational success.
Conference Chair: James Newkirk
Business Program Chair: Lowell Lindstrom
Leadership & Organization Program Chair: Pollyanna Pixton
Technical Program Chair: Brian Button
Research Program Chairs: Joseph T. Chao and Sallyann Freudenberg