Transitioning to Agile Development

The Agile development movement has started to transform the software landscape. Since February 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was published, Agile development has gone past the early adopter phase and now is regularly in use by such mainstream organizations as CapitalOne, the Federal Reserve Bank, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and major development departments in other organizations. For Agile practices to take hold-and more importantly to be sustained-all of the dysfunctional behaviors that organizations have acquired over the past twenty years or more must be discarded-and that is not easy or fun. However, the overwhelming benefits and value of Agile development are there, and for organizations in which software is their lifeblood, the effort will be made. Ken Schwaber discusses his experiences in organizations making this profound change and offers his predictions about where the software industry and Agile development practices are headed in the next five years.