I have been lucky enough to personally interview 14 of the agile manifesto authors, a project that has totally shifted my perspective on agility and working with teams. This project was the vision of my 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 were 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.
We learned that there were essentially 3 themes in all 14 interviews:
1. Focus on engineering culture
2. Build strong, empowered, teams
3. Establish mindfulness in delivery organizations
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.
You can find the recordings at podcast.agileuprising.com
You can learn more about Contino at contino.io
3. The hit list
➔ What is Agile? What is the Agile Manifesto?
➔ What is Extreme Programming (XP)?
➔ What does this have to do with DevOps?
➔ How arrogant can Ryan possibly be?
4. Interview Project
4
Holy crap! They actually want to
meet with us and share the story!
Happy Accident 1
The history of the Agile Manifesto
became the subtext to the project,
the future of software engineering
and teams emerged as the main
topic
Happy Accident 2
There was no prior work done to
document and capture the larger
story behind the Agile Manifesto
There was no
meaningful record
The Agile Manifesto Authors were
all aging and not as tightly
connected as they were in 2001
We are losing our way
https://goo.gl/CnVqpg
23. “Be an engineer, and use
that problem solving
skillset when
appropriate.“
James Grenning
24. “Thank god things in this
world are not built the way
we build software.
Damned if I’m sitting in
this building if it was built
how we build software.“
Jon Kern
25. “I don't ask permission to
write a test or refactor,
any more than I ask for
permission to write an if
statement or a for loop.“
Ron Jeffries
40. The emergence of people,
process, and technology
becomes the lifeblood of
organizations and
transformation.
People, process, technology
41. The cloud and
orchestration are a means
to create wild and
reckless resource and
financial waste for your
company if you don’t
know what you are doing.
Tech Practices