This year celebrates 10 years since the signing of the Agile Manifesto in February 2001 at the Snowbird Ski Resort, Utah. That was when 17 organizational thought leaders met to discuss and find common ground on the need to find a 'light-weight' alternative to plan-driven and disciplined software development processes; and thus gave birth to the Agile Alliance and published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The agenda, "to make the software industry productive, humane, and sustainable".
 
This February, Alistair Cockburn, one of the pioneers, hosted a reunion on the 10th anniversary of the occasion at the same venue, to celebrate the successes and discuss the problems the community faced over the decade. The gathering included people experienced in agile implementations from varied development backgrounds.
 
My experience with agile implementation has largely been across the board, from agile adoption to training, and customized methodology development to team performance. These 10 years have seen widespread adoption of agile methods, especially in outsourced product development, and much has happened in the world of software development since. Here I will mention two of the agile implementations that I have worked on.
 
Distributed Agile Delivery Model
Quite in contrast with the initial assumption of agile being suitable for small collocated teams, the flexibility and adaptability of agile best practices was equally accepted across large distributed teams. Distributed agile delivery models soon gained popularity with equal success. The challenge of implementing distributed development efforts across non-collocated teams required innovative thinking and the right mix of people. Using tools and techniques of Agile SCRUM and cross pollination of various other approaches, success was eventually achieved and replicated across various domains.


Agile Applications
It is inevitable to isolate Agile from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in organizational transformation. While SOA facilitates increased flexibility and cross organizational nature of business processes, Agile methods enable iterative development to complement the SOA architecture to implement active decision-making, accurate tracking, improved serviceability and better communication.
 
The convergence of SOA and Agile Development created easily modifiable Agile Applications that could accommodate fault tolerance and scalability. They are a set of loosely coupled set of services with a decoupled orchestration layer built to address business specific functional components and scalable by design.
 
Agile does not mean anarchy, it is simple yet disciplined. From humble beginnings, Agile has evolved through the decade. Initially applied in small scale implementations, Agile has leapfrogged into widespread adoption and made inroads into global delivery models, Embedded Systems, Enterprise development, Business and Project Management, Collaboration and User Experience. None of the methods are without shortcomings. And with the rapidly changing and evolving software domain, trouble is just round the corner. But the beauty of Agile is in its adaptability and flexible nature.
 
With the focus now shifting to the Agile2011 Annual Conference to be held in August in Salt Lake City, Utah, the question that comes to my mind - "What challenges will the future unfold for Agile implementation?” Exciting times ahead!!! What do you think?