Thoughts on Agile 2009 by Tom
Grant and Dave
West
Agile is dead, Long live agile.
That’s how the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago opened. In the keynote,
Alistair Cockburn cleverly paraphrased Marc Antony’s funeral oration from
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “I come to bury Agile, not to praise him.”
A very narrow definition of Agile has passed away, to be replaced by a
mature, expansive version that has now joined the mainstream of development
methodologies. Agile with a capital “A,” with its vision limited to the
development team, died of natural causes. Its successor still worries about
build scripts, daily Scrum meetings, and IDE plug-ins, but it recognizes the
sovereignty of business objectives, and governs jointly with other
methodologies. While we might talk more about agile with a small “a,” the
significance of this change is big.
You could see these signs of regime change throughout the conference. The
program book was a heavy tome, reflecting both the size of the audience for
Agile and the scope of questions that audience brought to Chicago. Instead of
presentations that argued the merits of one Agile approach over another, they
focused on topics such as scale, release management and executive sponsorship.
Serious project management issues such as managing resources and portfolios were
as popular as development processes, such as writing good stories or building a
continuous integration strategy.
Clearly, the breadth and depth of topics at Agile 2009 achieved a critical
mass of energy and enthusiasm, and then some. The number of sessions was
boggling, which made the conference program was a heavy tome. The sessions we
attended were full of people asking questions, sharing experiences, and
exchanging e-mail addresses so that they could continue these conversations.
Outside the official sessions, impromptu discussion groups and project
simulations filled ever alcove, seating and table area.
As apt as the
Julius Caesar reference was, a different Shakespearean allusion might
work even better. As you might tell from our description, Agile 2009 felt like a
significant point in the history of software development, the kind of moment
that reminded us of the famous speech from Henry V (paraphrased, with
apologies to the Bard):
We few, we happy few, we band of builders:
For he today that finishes his
sprint with me,
Shall be my brother: be he ne're so Waterfall,
This day
shall improve his productivity.
And product teams elsewhere, now
a-bed,
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here;
And hold their
projects cheap, while any speaks,
That attended with us Agile 2009.
Looking at the data from numerous surveys (results to be published soon),
approximately 40-45% of teams are now using Agile in some capacity. But before
we crown some new Agile king, it really needs to show how it can re-shape the
entire software supply chain, determining how organizations define portfolios,
releases and IT strategies. This new model of governance, therefore, must apply
the principles of Agile to broader problems.
For this reason, before its coronation, Agile may need to assume a different
name, Lean. Where Agile has re-defined how people work within the boundaries of
the development team, Lean’s dominion is the larger organization. Lean builds
upon Agile, as well as other disciplines that apply to parts of the organization
that share their boundaries with the development team. You might say that Agile
governs one province, but Lean governs the entire kingdom.
Certainly the vendors at the conference have started to take notice of what
this regime change means. The vendor village contained the old nobility of Agile
tools—Rally, VersionOne, Danube, and others. As the boundaries of Agile/Lean
expand, other vendors, such as Microsoft, IBM, Serena, and Microfocus (including
their recent Borland acquisition) have joined the court. These vendors are less
provincial, but they have had to assimilate the local dialect and customs of
Agile. At the same time, the Agile tools vendors have been learning how to be
more cosmopolitan, without losing touch with their essential roots.
In the next year, rather than continuing to jostle and elbow each other, some
of these vendors may join forces as part of mergers and acquisitions. Others may
decide to focus just on the provinces they know best. For vendors and their
customers alike, the near future may be, to use (or abuse) Shakespeare again,
“the brightest heaven of invention.”
[Cross-posted at the Forrester blog for application developers and the Forrester blog for product managers and marketers.]
