Agile Ain't An Adjective

Janis is an award-winning journalist and editor who has covered many industries beyond project management, including health care, financial services, higher education and retail sales.

  Agile   ProjectsAtWork  

A founding member of both the Agile and Scrum Alliances, Mike Cohn has been effectively applying Agile techniques for 15 years. Here, he share his thoughts on its evolution, outlines five steps to becoming more Agile. He also explains why, ultimately, he’d like to see the term go away.

A 15-year veteran agile practitioner and ScrumMaster trainer, Mike Cohn is a well-known advocate of agile software development for the benefits it delivers on IT projects. A founding member of both the Agile Alliance and the Scrum Alliance, he was recently a keynote speaker at the Agile 2010 Conference, which drew more than 1,400 attendees this past August.

Cohn has witnessed the huge productivity and quality gains great agile teams can achieve, but he knows that not every agile implementation goes that well. That’s why Cohn is careful not to oversell the approach, choosing instead to lay out a sustainable method for getting started with and getting better at agile. Cohn’s ADAPT model can help companies iterate toward increased agility.

ProjectsAtWork spoke with Cohn, founder of Lafayette, Colo.-based Mountain Goat Software, to learn what steps he recommends for success and why he ultimately wants “agile” to go away.

You have been entrenched in the agile camp since 1995. How have you seen the use of agile evolve and grow over the past decade? In the …

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