… was a panel discussion I ran on Tuesday evening at a joint meeting of the SPA Conference and the Extreme Tuesday Club. Ten years ago, at OT99, Kent Beck gave a keynote which effectively kick-started agile in Europe, and Paul Dyson and I ran (I think) the first conference workshop on XP this side of the Atlantic. I asked four of the UK’s agile pioneers - the aforementioned Paul Dyson, Tim Mackinnon, Rachael Davies and Ivan Moore, to tell the stories of how they got started in XP and agile development, before the proliferation of books, courses, coaches, conferences, certification; where they think the world is at today, and what they hope and fear for the next ten years of agile.

Paul has blogged the discussion - and restated his conclusion there:

Perhaps the Agile community has become a bit too focussed on certification rather than learning, on easy rather than effective methods, and on being recognised as ‘being Agile’ rather than achieving agility. But I believe that the world is changing in a way that will force the Agile community to adapt or die and I’m optimistic that we will achieve the former.

I share Paul’s optimism - for the non-doctrinaire, it’s an exciting time to be working in software, with society, business, and technology worlds changing at an ever-growing pace.

One thing that came out of the discussion for me was a strong feeling that what distinguished the early days was both awareness of the counter-intuitive and challenging aspects of (as it was mainly discussed then) XP, but nevertheless a desire - born out of long experience and conviction of how broken were the current ways of developing software - to try these practices anyway - so rather than the pick-and-choose approach (we’re doing everything except pairing, because it won’t work here) the attitude is to try it (maybe because people you know and respect have done so) and see if it could or doesn’t work for you. A combination of curiosity and courage that’s missing from most agile adoptions today. As Tim said, people think that “religiously” following the original XP practices is not the way to do it, but perhaps people need to do that, to ground the practices and to earn the right to an opinion.

All of us talked about the original wiki, created by Ward Cunningham - this was the source of knowledge and the site of debate in an era before blogs and IM. As Paul tweeted the next day, Ward was busy creating Web 2.0 when most of us were still struggling with Web 0.5.

It was enjoyable going back to those early days - at times it felt like rock family trees (who paired with whom, in whose company, or talked at which conference…) It’s important to keep these stories alive, and to realise that the sense of urgency, passion and courage that drove those early experiments with new ways of working are a large reason for their success.