Agile Comes to the Mall

Today was Day 1 of the Agile2007 Conference in Washington, DC. Conferences are funny. If you come with a group of peers you can fit into the flow of normal patterns: you talk, you joke, you visit the Starbucks in the lobby of the hotel every 45 minutes. If you are a presenter, you are embraced and recognized. I recognized a number of the stars of the conference today and I admit I felt a little like SpongeBob at a jellyfishing exposition, "Hi Kevin, I'm your biggest fan."

It is a little different if you're alone at a conference. There is a period of awkwardness that must be worked through as you walk around finding the restrooms, checking the location of your first session, waiting for refreshments to be put out, and all the while acting a little like a clandestine operative sneaking surreptitious glimpses at as many conference badges as you possibly can without making eye contact or walking into furniture or other attendees.

Anyway, I think there is significance to the conference coming to DC this year. My feeling is that the more than 1,200 attendees who will go to the 600+ sessions, workshops, tutorials, and keynotes will represent an implicit and explicit recognition that agile has become more mainstream than alternative.

Although this conference may not be the Tipping Point for agile, it may be the Mall Point where agile moves to a recognizable destination where corporate tourists visit for an hour or a day and think they have gained deep understanding of something (agile) that seems simple, but is in reality very rigorous, broad, deep, and difficult to do well and to do right.

It seems to be a concern in the agile community (and a theme of some of the Agile2007 sessions) that those corporate tourists who will now try to use agile will not understand what the Agile Manifesto was really getting at and why it was such an important statement. I think there is a justified protectiveness around the philosophy of agile and I hope that everyone who wants to use agile methods really tries to understand the philosophy in order to affect real change.

The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, Robbins-Gioia.