Much of the Agile ThoughtLeadership is focusing on getting Agile “Across the Chasm”. Listening to these leaders, you would be forgiven for thinking Agile has solved all the problems.

Agile practitioners know that we have a long way to go. There are a lot of problems that have not been solved.

I start with a brief but inflammatory history and current assessment of Agile. This was very popular with practitioners.

I then present about 10 areas where Agile is far from complete and where we need to focus more effort to find solutions.

TDD is promoted as a powerful technique for combining software design, testing, and coding to increase reliability and productivity. However the transition to TDD is not always easy. Is it worth the effort and what can really be gained from it? This report describes a useful transition strategy based on different TDD styles and identifies key elements required for each style. It identifies differences found on code that developed using these TDD styles. The differences are striking in their consistency and give a strong indication that TDD is well worth the effort.

When it is achieved together, the combined benefits of both Agile and Offshore software development, can be multiples greater than either approach alone. During this interactive session, we will simulate a distributed project with some participants being onsite and the others offshore. With 4 teams of upto 8 people each, this game will draw out learning around the challenges of Distributed Agile and different methods to communicate successfully on such projects. The rules of the game help illustrate how to deal with travel, different timezones, delayed communication and other such hurdles.