10th Year Birth Anniversary of Agile

      Between 11th and 13th of February 2001, the lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah gave the space to Agile Manifesto to be born.  The 

17 people at this logde were not merely talking, relaxing and skiing. They were brainstorming about the issues that software developers (including themselves) were facing every day.  The final day took the birth of  Agile Software Development Alliance.

 

Read the story of Agile Birth here.  

Now after 10 years of  Agile invention, Alistair Cockburn  had organized a reunion event.

 

In addition, 16 out of the 17 signatories will take the stage on Aug 8th at  Agile 2011 Conference.     

During this conference, attendees will enjoy open access to all 17 stages hosting speakers, classes, workshops and special events, plus a stage dedicated to Open Jam: a place for problem solving and collaboration where anyone can convene a session, share questions and quandaries, talk to the experts, demonstrate software and techniques, and experiment with emerging Agile practices and ideas.  

Agile2011 promises a stimulating week of learning, collaborating, brainstorming, and sharing problems and solutions while networking and making valuable connections

Agile Vs Lean

There are a lot of articles on the net explaining the differences between Agile Vs Lean.  There are eternal debates about them too.  But this article AgileVersusLean by Martin Fowler gives the most simplistic explanation about the subject.
In the above article, Martin ends by saying I think of lean as a strand of thinking within the agile community, like a pattern in a rich carpet.

Picture courtesy: http://www.popgadget.net/2008/02/flexible_hanger.php

Importance of Cross Functional Teams

As per the Harvard Business Review professor Tiziana Casciaro, an expert in Organizational Behavior 

“Working with similar people leads to limited perspective and heterogeneous group brings different perspectives to the table and bring truly innovative approaches to solve a task” 


I guess this could be one of the key reasons of having cross functional team practice in Scrum.  In most of the Non-Agile projects, the teams are formed based on architecture layers.
For ex: UI team, Database Team, Middleware team.  

Each of the above is a homogeneous group and there is less innovation.  

However, most of the Agile methods recommend team formation based on the story or Requirement as opposed to the architecture layers.   This would encourage having team members from UI, Database, Middleware, Testing, etc.  working together leading to formation of heterogeneous team.  Heterogeneous teams are found to bring different perspective to the table and thus bringing creativity