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AgileBaseCamp Kiev 2011: Alexey Krivitsky: The Future is Now

Disclaimer: text below is compilation of notes I made on AgileBaseCamp 2011 conference, listening to different speakers. I do it to keep knowledge I got on conference, share it with my colleagues and anyone else who interested. It is only about how I heard, interpret, write down the original speech. It also includes my subjective opinion on some topics. So it could not 100% reflects author opinion and original ideas.

That was the opening speech of AgileBaseCamp conference that took place in Kiev, 16-Apr-2011. Alexey Krivitsky who is head of ScrumGuides was sharing his vision about Agile through last years.

The dates for this Base camp were dedicated to major event in Agile world, namely it is 10 years from Agile Manifesto has been signed. All of us know who the software development changed with this event, but was it in good way, bad way? Who know’s and Alexey tries to analyze that.

Past

Alexey shared his personal story of starting up with Agile. He used to work in big Ukrainian outsourcing company. That time (I think it was somewhere around 2003) this company was adopting CMM3 and customer company was adopting CMM2 itself. Alexey took part on both processes of adoption and did great job there (I know that, because I worked the same company that time and know that efforts were successful :). That was both good experience and key factor to change his mind on software production. He quit the company realizing that his vision very different from one dictated by CMM.

That time Agile was not so well-spread as it is now (I’m pretty sure that time very few people in Ukraine knew something about Agile, Scrum, Kanban etc). So, having Alistair Cockburn book printed out on corporate printer he started his journey in Agile world. Not only improving own knowledge and experience, but sharing the information with community.

Present

One of the software development institutes does statistics of projects success in 1994 and 2004. Figures are:

  • 1994 - success rate 15%
  • 2004 - success rate 34%

This is a definitely impact of agile. There was an interesting speech about details of this impact on Agilee 2010 Henrik Kniberg speech: The essence of Agile. In a little other words in 10 years we’ve learned to “suck less”.

A lot of information about Agile nowadays. Many, many books became available.. a lot of conferences, trainings, blogs. New brands became popular as Software Craftsmanship, Lean Startup, Management 3.0 and more. From the management factors agile moving to engineering and business factors. Code is still the key in software (even if a lot of people thinks it is not).

Future

Even with a great popularity of Agile it is still not mainstream. We still talk about Agile itself a lot and would continue to talk at least 2 years. Originally it was Waterfall as biggest enemy of Agile, but now this enemy is weak and it is no longer interesting to fight it :). Due to Mike Cohn we would stop to talk about Agile at all and simply start to do that. To reach that stage we need to have crowd of people who are “on-the-same-page” with understanding of Agile, but it is not the time now.

There is no silver bullet, but there is super glue that unite teams.. Agile is this kind of glue.