Andy Hunt, one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto, characterized what Agile has become as "do half of Scrum badly and use Jira." In fact, neither Scrum (even if done right) nor Jira has much to do with being agile. It's agility—the ability to welcome change whenever it's needed (even while we're working)—that's important. Agility infuses every aspect of you you develop products, from company culture, to planning, to the way you construct the software. No boiler plate methodology or framework gives you that.

This seminar (and it's a true seminar—a guided discussion in which questions can get answered and we can learn from each other) will explore what Agile is, what it isn't, and how to get from fake Agile-in-name-only to the real thing. There will be a few slides when we discuss process, but mostly, we'll be doing a deep dive into the Agile Manifesto (agilemanifesto.org) and Allen's "Heuristics for Effective Software Development Organisations" (holub.com/heu). We'll cover everything from theory to practical application—what truly agile organizations actually look like.

We'll also look deeply at what goes wrong, at how things like Sprints and backlogs and estimation lead you down the garden path to failure and what to do instead.