Agile: A Retrospective and Forecast

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  

The first decade of the new millennium brought agile software development to the fore. What was learned and what does the future hold? Agile innovator and observer David A. Thomas offers his opinions.

A pioneer in the agile movement, David A. Thomas, founder and current chair of Bedarra Research Labs and former CEO of Object Technology International, travels the world as a thought leader and business strategist focused on the latest trends in software development. Listing significant contributions to industry and academia, his CV is 21 pages long. It reflects the depth and breadth of the platform from which he speaks and consults.

ProjectsAtWork recently caught up with Thomas at his Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, home base after he returned from an engagement in Australia. We asked Thomas to look back at the past decade to assess the progress and proliferation of agile software development and to look ahead at how the field may change.

As founding director of the Agile Alliance, Thomas shares his experience and highlights interesting considerations for project managers impacted by the evolution of software work. Perhaps to the relief of many, he predicts a simpler approach to development in the future.

How did the decade go in terms of agile? The good news is that most people who are with it at all are at least using the agile work practices called Scrum. An …

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