We are excited to have the world’s foremost authority on the fusion of artisanal retro-futurism with team-scale anarcho-syndicalism presenting what everyone knows is the best of all possible methods for producing software.

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.

Brian Marick (@marick) is an instigator and a dynamic speaker. He was one of the authors and signatories of the Agile Manifesto, was instrumental in the creation of the Gordon Pask award and is the author of three books (_The Craft of Software Testing_, _Everyday Scripting with Ruby_, and _RubyCocoa_).

Hopefully, he won’t leave us all hanging this time…