Brian Marick, Owner, Exampler Consulting, Champaign, IL

View the video of Brian’s session

A problem with the word “Agile” is that everyone already thinks they understand it at a gut level. Worse, everyone already thinks they’re agile in spirit. (After all, the thesaurus tells us the alternative is to be clumsy, stiff, slow, and dull.) So it’s too easy for people to feel free to launch into “doing Agile” without ever having a serious conversation about what that actually means.

This problem is easily fixed. We’ll just stop talking about “Agile” and start speaking of “artisanal retro-futurism crossed with team-scale anarcho-syndicalism.” There is, I think, no danger that anyone will reflexively say, “Yes! That’s just what I’ve been wanting to do all along!”

The new name does more than just encourage conversation. It encourages conversation about those very properties of Agile that have become obscure as Agile has been commodified. In this session, I’ll unpack the meanings of the new phrase and encourage you to rediscover what’s been lost.

About Brian

Brian Marick (marick@exampler.com, www.exampler.com, twitter.com/marick) was a programmer, tester, and team lead in the 80’s, a testing consultant in the 90’s, and is an Agile consultant this decade. Brian is one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, a past chair of the Agile Alliance, and the author of three books: The Craft of Software Testing, Everyday Scripting with Ruby, and Programming Cocoa With Ruby.