Exploration Through Example

I’ll be giving the keynote at this year’s XP Day Toronto.

Six Years Later: What the Agile Manifesto Left Out. The Agile Manifesto has worked rather well at changing the way software is built, but the Agile movement is now suffering from some backsliding and some backlash. I believe that’s partly because the Manifesto is almost entirely focused outward: it talks, to the business, about how the development team will interact with it. What it does not talk about is how the team must interact with itself and with the code. In the early days, that didn’t matter so much; the right interactions tended to happen anyway. But now it matters. In this speech, I want to talk in some detail about what got left out.

I’m also co-responsible for the Open Space: What XP Projects Forget:

A successful Agile team is a complicated web of… things: people, practices, tools, and so forth. Some of them are well-documented, some not. Even for those that are documented, Andrew Tannenbaum’s motto applies: “People need more often to be reminded than informed.” As more and more Agile teams form, the need for both reminding and informing is increasing.