The Next Iteration Agile: Re-contextualizing Agile for the 21st Century (Part 2)

Don is an entrepreneur and business leader with over 15 years experience specializing in aligning management-driven technologies and initiatives together with business and project strategies resulting in thoroughly planned and comprehensive business solutions. His expertise as a project manager, developer, tester, analyst, trainer, consultant, and business owner has spanned across diverse industries such as finance, retail, health care and information technology

  Agile   Applications Delivery   Information Technology   Manufacturing   Quality   Scrum   Testing/Test Management  

Part 1 of this series discussed the background environment and philosophical divergences that caused agile to establish itself as an alternative to traditional project management--which occurred as early as the 1950s before establishing itself as a recognized and formally established method and practice of project delivery in just over the last decade. With that background established, it’s now time to start thinking about the where agile is headed and how it will get re-contextualized for the 21^st century.

Convergence of methods and continued adoption outside software development
When agile as we know it was conceived back in 2001 with the proclamation of the Agile Manifesto, there were numerous techniques such as Extreme Programming, Scrum, DSDM and Feature-Driven Development. But since that time, the more lightweight practices of Scrum, Lean and Kanban have been favored and more widely practiced. Though each method has their own set of practices, techniques and concepts, the trend I’ve been seeing is the convergence of both the commonalities as well as divergences of practices and techniques in use (where appropriate).

Furthermore, we are now witnessing the application of these agile practices beyond the field of software development to diverse fields such radio program development, government IT, etc. which I have written about extensively.

No …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.