International Speaker Dave Snowden - Agile sound practice - poor theory

Please note the new start time. Dave Snowden will present from 6pm, open from 5.30pm.

When the Agile Manifesto was launched it made a series of radical statements about how things should change. Since then a body of practice (such as SCRUM) has arisen to try and make those principles work in practice. However good principles and practical experience can only take you so far; unless you understand why things work it will be difficult to make them scale, or work when the context of their creation changes.

To take one example. "Self-organisation" is a great idea but its not the same thing as anarchy. Complexity science shows us that self-organisation in nature occurs when some constraint is present, but not when there are no constraints. Add "partially constrained" to "self-organisation" and we have a more useful and adaptive technique.

In addition Agile has yet to penetrate executive decision making and we are still in effect living in a world where executives determine policy, which eventually mutates into requirements at which point Agile techniques come into play. The nature of the world we live in requires a real time interaction between strategy and software development in which both co-evolve. In such an environment technology not only meets business requirements it also helps create them. New micro-narrative approaches to requirements capture and programme monitoring are one of the most exciting emergent opportunities that are starting to open up.

This presentation will look to provide some of the theory with examples of how practice changes. It will describe the Cynefin framework which is currently in use at both board room level for strategy and in software development teams. Participants should leave understanding the basic principles of complexity theory and how they apply to design, requirements capture and evaluation and monitoring.

Level of expertise: There should be something in his talk for everyone