Presentation: "Keeping Agile Agile"

Time: Wednesday 15:35 - 16:35

Location: Stanford Room

Abstract:
Adopting Agile often involves creating special process teams and hiring Methodology (with a big M) consultants to implement and enforce Agile Best Practices. Entire industries have grown up around accreditation, auditing, and support of specific Agile methods. So is this approach really helping you, or might it in fact be working against your organization?

Dan argues that best practices and are useful only up to a point, and that rigidly enforcing them is counter to the values of Agile and will eventually drive away your best people. He looks at the motivations behind Agile initiatives and introduces the Dreyfus model of skills acquisition to explore how effective best practices really are.

Dan North, Agile troublemaker, developer, originator of BDD

 Dan  North Dan writes software and coaches teams in agile and lean methods. He believes in putting people first and writing simple, pragmatic software. He believes that most problems that teams face are about communication, and all the others are too. This is why he puts so much emphasis on "getting the words right", and why he is so passionate about behaviour-driven development, communication and how people learn. He has been working in the IT industry since he graduated in 1991, and he occasionally blogs at dannorth.net.