Elephants in the Agile Room

In February 2011, ten years after the Agile Manifesto was written at Snowbird, a group gathered at the same place to reflect on what agile had achieved and to look into the future. Todd was part of a group that set out to "hunt elephants": the issues the agile community knew about but was not talking about.

Todd shares some of those elephants, including pretending agile is not a business, dogma winning out over context, elitism as an excuse for failures, the reality of distributed teams, the role of culture and politics, and certification (the "zombie elephant"). He balances them with the real successes of the first ten years, and closes with the four value propositions that came out of the event for taking agility forward:

• Demand Technical Excellence
• Promote Individual Change and Lead Organizational Change
• Organize Knowledge and Improve Education
• Maximize Value Creation Across the Entire Process