Living in the hotbed of Agile Software Development

I was reminded today how fortunate I am to be here in Utah, where Agile was born and continues to thrive.

(The Agile Manifesto was conceived at The Lodge at Snowbird, not half an hour from my house. One of the authors, Alistair Cockburn, lives in Salt Lake City, as do other powerful Agile advocates, like Jeff Patton.)

[Humorous likenesses of Alistair and Jeff used without permission, and, most likely, at risk of serious retribution.]

I was asked by Jonathan Rayback, another local Agile mover and shaker, to talk today in our local Agile in Management meeting about our first experience with the Walking Skeleton concept (conceived and named by Alistair over 10 years ago). I didn't have much time to work on it (due to vacations and a pressing work schedule), but I threw together some thoughts and slides and drove to the meeting, feeling a little nervous, but confident that I had some useful experience to share.

What I didn't know was that Alistair himself would be there. Right! I'm supposed to explain the Walking Skeleton concept to the guy who created it!

Within my little world, this was akin to a physicist explaining the Theory of Relativity to Albert Einstein, or a political scientist explaining the Monroe Doctrine to...well, James Monroe!

Of course, Alistair was extremely gracious and helped me feel at ease from the very beginning. More importantly, he critiqued my presentation very gently, yet honestly. I walked away feeling that I could make the same presentation to a different group in full confidence that I was representing his concept accurately and effectively.

What a great opportunity, though, to rub shoulders with some of the "great ones" of the Agile movement. I've never been in a room with Alistair when I didn't learn something.

One of the interesting things about Alistair is his skepticism of Scrum. Not that he's opposed to it. In fact, whenever Mickey, Sheridan or I tell him how great Scrum is working for us, he expresses his enthusiasm (and shock?) over our successes. It just seems that he's seen a lot of failures in half-hearted or misguided attempts to implement Scrum.

In any case, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a better place to do Agile than Utah. Now if we could just get Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland to move to Salt Lake City...