How the agile community could still be a force of good that drives software development out of the swamp of false promises
75 minutes
CONTEXT
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Stories about epic failures in adopting heavy-weight "agile" frameworks, and their huge waste of money and time, are slowly spreading.
The obsessive focus on scaled frameworks certifications in the job market is slowly fading.
There are signs of a renewed interest in the key agile principles and the simplicity of the original agile frameworks and practices.
QUESTION
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How can the agile community be again a force of good, beyond ego, self-interest and marketing/sales ambitions,
- driving the attention again toward the simplicity and the fundamental, genuine and authentic pillars of agile that work,
- reinforcing the good ideas and practices lost and forgotten, and the important lessons learned after decades of practice
- affirming, celebrating, and promoting the most promising lines of research and innovation in the field of agile software development?
OBJECTIVES
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This session is an open discussion among longtime agile practitioners with the aim to
- find interesting answers to those questions, and
- draft an action plan to involve in the conversation those agile thought leaders more active in supporting the community and advancing the craft of agile.
NOTES FOR ORGANISERS
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While I'm comfortable in organising, facilitating, and summarising the outcomes of this session, to make it work I'd need the help of the organisers to ensure the presence of longtime agile practitioners and ideally getting in contact with some of them beforehand to start the conversation and provide a more advanced starting point for the session
- Longtime agile practitioners
- Those experienced in new digital products development
- More recent Software developers and agile practitioners
- Improve their understanding of the ideas and practices at the core of the original agile idea of agile
- For longtime agile practitioners: Improve their ability to articulate and communicate their competitive advantage in terms of genuine agile practice and authentic agile innovation
- post-its, sharpies
Initial Draft:
- Introduction: problem statement
- Short discussion to validate, clarify, refine/re-define the problem statement
- Group activity 1: eliciting the forces at work supporting and hindering the proposed goals; summarising and presenting the outcome
- Group activity 2: brainstorming on the answers to the original question; summarising and presenting the outcome
- General discussions on what emerged from the different groups during the previous group activities
- Group activity 3: action plan to engage and involve the agile community around this goal
- Final summary and closing notes
Initial Draft (time vary based on groups # and size):
- 10 min - Introduction
- 15 min Short discussion
- 30 min Group activity 1: individual brainstorming, post-its storm, group clustering and selection, group discussion, summarising and presenting to the other groups
- 30 min Group activity 2: same as before
- 15 min General discussions
- 20 min Group activity 3: post-its storm, group clustering, summarising and presenting to the other groups
- 10 min Final summary and closing notes
Outputs:
- the original output of each session with answers to each of the initial questions in email, and the overall output summarised in a web page
- the action plan