RonJeffriesPositionPaper

What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?

"Ah. Well... I attended Juilliard... I'm a graduate of the Harvard
business school. I travel quite extensively. I lived through the
Black Plague and had a pretty good time during that ..."
— Beetlejuice

After that, I was the on-site coach of the first Extreme
Programming project. I am co-author of /Extreme Programming
Installed/, author of /Extreme Programming Adventures in C#/,
proprietor of the highly-ranked www.XProgramming.com, prolific
contributor to most of the Agile lists that I haven't been
expelled from, and for over ten years have coached many
organizations in North America and Europe in adopting sensible
software development practices.

What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?

I'm interested in a few related topics:

* Is it true that a large percentage of Agile teams fall away
from the Agile practices after a while? If so, why, and what
can we do about it? If not, why am I running into so many?

* Has the notion of "Agile" become so watered-down ( or always
been so watered-down) as to be essentially meaningless? If
so, is this fact related to the question above?

* Should there even be such a thing as "Agile", or "XP", or any
other named method, or is this just sensible software
development?

How do you plan to contribute?

I plan to attend interesting sessions, asking questions and making
comments that I intend to be helpful. I'm also sharing the cost
of the venue with Chet.