Welcome!

Welcome to the Agile Alliance’s Archivist’s blog.

The Agile Alliance website was created in early 2001 in the wake of the now famous Snowbird meeting and writing of the Agile Manifesto. For about one year the site hosted only the Manifesto. Then in 2002 the Alliance incorporated as a non-profit, moved the Manifesto to its own domain, and established a new site. This went through several design iterations before the current look which dates from 2010.

In all these years the site did without an official blog. Without, in fact, even an unofficial one. What’s changing? What will be published here?

This blog belongs in a category between “official” and “unofficial”. It is “official” in the sense of being a part of the Agile Alliance’s web presence. It is “unofficial” to the extent that the views and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of the Agile community, the Agile Alliance as an organization, or its Board of Directors, but the individual views and opinions of whoever posts here. However, it is this particular author’s hope and intent that these pages will frequently host the views and opinions of many of those passionate members of the Agile community.

As for myself, I am currently the Agile Alliance’s “Archivist”. What does this title mean? Not necessarily much more than a handy label for recognizing something that needed to be addressed more than it had been previously: trying to collect, summarize, and organize the various ways that people over the years have tried to answer the question “What is this Agile thing all about anyway?”

One of the duties I undertook as the Archivist was to provide (and maintain) the Guide to Agile Practices. This will continue to evolve and hopefully become an ever more useful resource to members of the community.

Another similar duty, this one ongoing, will be to organize the large amounts of content that have been presented to attendees of the long-running Agile cycle of conferences and make this content accessible and relevant to the now much larger population of people interested in what topics Agile covers, where it has come from and how it has changed over the years. The Conference Archive is an early release toward these goals.

Another function of this blog will be to explain why these activities are important, and what we hope will result from them.

Yet another will be to provide an opportunity to reaffirm strong ties with communities that are part of (or which overlap with) the Agile community: for instance – this isn’t meant as an exhaustive list – the communities known as Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean, Lean Startup, Lean Kanban, DevOps, Software Craftsmanship… The list goes on; a sign – depending on which glasses you choose to wear – either of fragmentation or of vitality leading to innovation. (I choose to focus on the latter interpretation, even if both are probably partly true.)

This being a blog, expect too that it will sometimes respond to the moment: to some momentous or trivial piece of news, to a passing whim or fancy. Please never hesitate to let us know what you’d like to see more of and less of!

This is an Agile Alliance community blog post. Opinions represented are personal and belong solely to the author. They may not represent the opinion or policy of Agile Alliance.

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Kent McDonald

Kent McDonald

Kent J McDonald writes about and practices software product management. He has IT and product development experience in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, nonprofit, and automotive. Kent currently practices his craft for a variety of organizations and provides just in time resources for product owners and business analysts at KBP.media and Product Collective. When not writing or product managing, Kent is his family’s #ubersherpa, listens to jazz and podcasts (but not…

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