program selection system

What does it mean to be agile? What is lean and how does it relate to agile? How does our definition of agile evolve? How do we learn and adapt as a community and as an organization (the Agile Alliance)? What about these new ideas: Behavior-driven development, Kanban, Real Option Theory, and others? Are they agile or not? What about older ideas like Evo and Spiral? Do we measure agile and agility by the observed practices or do we look to values, principles and underlying paradigms that agile (and Lean) have sought to change?

The agile community has a choice. Do we seek a homogeneous definition of agile around an agreed set of practices or do we continue to challenge each other and innovate new ideas and concepts and new practices? How do we evolve that underlying model of agile and when do we know whether a new idea fits with our agile values? and how do we discuss the extension and modification of those values?

The agile community wastes a lot of energy arguing about what is agile or not? Petty squabbling about whether lean is agile or not, and whether its compatible or not, waste energy and de-focus the community from the true goal of finding better ways of delivering better software, of higher value more often and more repeatably.

In this presentation I will discuss these issues and provide my vision for the future direction of agile and the agile community. I will discuss the underlying paradigms behind the agile manifesto and lean thinking and discuss newer ideas like Kanban, Real Options and Behavior-driven development and some older ideas like CMMI and evaluate how we think of them against our agile values and objectives of our community and movement.

The threat of the agile community breaking in to disparate factions is real. I will propose a mechanism for how we grow a healthy community that can learn and evolve our values and practices without losing sight of our mission, goals and objectives.