Key Takeaways on Future of Agile from #Agile2014

Hearing more than 2000 developers, executives, managers, and consultants collaborate on all things Agile is an inspiring experience. It’s always a treat to be around experts in the space and partners like Atlassian who are as passionate about Agile as we are.

Our team returned from Agile 2014 with great enthusiasm about the future of Agile and want to share some of the key themes and insights trending today.

DevOps

Removing barriers between building software and seeing it go live, the unification of development and delivery, end to end Deployment; however you define it, DevOps is the phrase of the year. While the concept of DevOps might be more mature in theory than in actuality, we expect to see even more conversation around building in feedback loops to create continuous decision-making processes.

Enterprise Agile / Agile @ Scale

Getting businesses to buy into Agile and having it pushed down from the top has become a heated discussion as the conversation moves from single team level to enterprise level. While most are in agreement of the need to improve process at the enterprise level, not everyone agrees that quickly scaling Agile is the right solution since the foundation of Agile is a focus on little details to inspire quick change.

Going forward, we expect there will be a lot of analysis and conversation about including the human factors that go into organizational change and building the best solution for each unique situation. While Agile might be mandated from above, organizations still need buy in from grassroots level to make it a success. This ties into an overarching need for more alignment between development and the business side of organizations.

The business side is starting to ask questions like, “I gave you $4 million, what features are those funds tied up in? They are beginning to think about aligning Agile Portfolio with organization strategy looking for feedback on whether the features being created from certain fund allocations are tied into the appropriate business goals.

That being said, we definitely heard a lot of buzz at conference about the announcement of SAFe 3.0 to help enterprises improve coordination of large value streams.

Integrations

Another theme we’re excited about and expect to hear a lot more conversations around is the idea of integration. The reality is that there is no longer one tool to do it all. If part of an organization is using version 1 of a particular tool and the development team is using version 2, there is no longer a need to rip and replace. Because there are so many tools available now, we can look at a variety of options for migration, integration, configuration and set up to come up with the best, least stressful solution.

If you’re interested in chatting about any of these topics, please let us know. We’re looking forward to continuing many of these conversations at the Atlassian Summit in California soon.