What is the vision and purpose?

Agile Roots was born out of conversations started at the Salt Lake City Agile Roundtable between practitioners on the Agile path.

We all recognized similar struggles and anti-patterns  in Agile implementations and in many cases these problems didn’t seem to be improving.

In discussion, the root cause of the problem was almost always neglecting the Agile manifesto’s balancing values and principles, manifesting in empty ‘Agile’ rituals.

Furthermore, we identified a key factor for successful Agile adoption as management level understanding and support for the Agile initiative. Executives who truly valued the ideas and principles were often the difference between a high functioning Agile team and a mandated buzzword compliant ‘Agile’ implementation or a decimated grassroots ‘Agile uprising’.

Our vision was to bring all the different groups that represent an Agile team together, candidly reflect on the values and principles, then build on our experiences and understanding to improve the future.

The goals for the conference are to:

• revisit the Agile Manifesto’s values and principles
• discuss the current state of Agile practice, good, bad and ugly in relation to the Agile values
• encourage Agile practitioners to never stop uncovering better ways of developing software
• vitalize our Agile practices (by doing ‘it’ and helping others to do ‘it’.)

The Agile Manifesto wasn’t the destination, it was a milestone marking a new beginning.