I was lucky enough to have interviewed 14 of the 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto for a special podcast project with the intent to chronicle the manifesto story. What emerged was much more. The story of why the event was needed, what the vision was, how this was ruined.
This project totally shifted my perspective on agility and working with teams. This project was the vision of his team – the Agile Uprising – and was conducted over 6 months and chronicled via a globally distributed podcast. During this time period, our podcast went from 0 listeners to an average of 8,000 per month.
The initial inception of the project was to tell the story behind the manifesto and it’s authors. The trigger was some work we we're doing with Ken Schwaber and it was cancelled due to his failing health. We realized there was a huge moment in software history that had not been told, and these men were not getting any younger. We intended to interview each to understand what they were doing before, during and shortly after the Manifesto event in 2001. As the interviews started adding up, we heard a story of what Agile was meant to be, versus what it has become. In this session, we will learn how DevOps is the true agility enabler.
We learned that there were essentially 3 themes in all 14 interviews:
These 3 simple bullets are generally missed in most agile adoptions and transformations. Perhaps parts or some aspects are met, but on-whole, they are lacking. We focus too much on agile as a topic of didactic learning, and not a mindset. And what you see really emerge as a thing of beauty, is the residual benefits where these themes intersect. When Mindfulness and Technical Practices overlap you form strong process and integrated DevOps. Where Strong Teams and Technical Practices overlap you find rapid delivery of high quality working software. And where you find the convergence of all three elements, you find true value delivery flow.
This talk hones in on the re-centering of agile intent. It is agnostic of certification and scaling conversations, and builds a solid argument for the movements in Alistair Cockburn’s “Heart of Agile”, Joshua Kerievsky’s “Modern Agile” and Bob Martin’s “Clean Coder” movements.
As the talk wraps, I provide hope for the future of agility and engineering. A direction for attendees to move and an attempt to challenge the larger agile anti-patterns that are very prevalent in practice today.
Key Take-a-Ways:
PDU Claim Code: C002PNLTH4
