Abstract

With the increasing interest in agile development the various methodologies have gained more and more attention in the community. As a side effect of their success, nearly every process around tries to prove that it is agile, whatever that may be. Although the agile manifesto defines the core values of agile development, it is easy to state that a particular process values humans -- and an insult to argue against that.

With all their differences, published agile methodologies, such as ASD, Crystal, Scrum, or XP, have several techniques in common, other processes don't have. One example is a meeting structure with different meetings that reflects the value agile development assigns to collaboration. The objective of this workshop is to identify how the the principles of agile development are reflected in practice in Agile projects -- both to help evaluating existing methodologies and to help setting up a project-specific process.

Contents

Beside the common value system of agile methods, as it is expressed in the agile manifesto, these development environments also are aligned on the principles of agile software development. Identifying these principles are supposed by the various practices may help to design an agile process for a particular project. In addition it may increase our understanding of what ,agile development" really means in practice.

The XP 2002 workshop ,Bringing Structure to Experience With Agile Development" aims at collecting experience from daily projects. The workshop we propose here aims at analyzing the existing body of agile methods and identifying commonalities.

Objectives

The workshop aims at a better understanding what makes an agile methodology and which techniques are appropriate in which situation. The best outcome would be a starting line for an ,Agile Development Handbook" that identifies techniques and hints on how to set up an agile project.

Attendees

Every interested practitioner, consultant, teacher, academic, or otherwise interested person is invited to apply for attendance. We primarily seek submissions from people who have worked with one or more agile methods. Applicants (and Organizers!) need to submit a position statement.

The following position papers are available:

Paul Bramble (PDF 58k)	Klaus Marquardt (PDF 79k)	Toby Sarver (HTML)
Jens Coldewey (PDF 119k)	Brian Marick (PDF 111k)	Klaus Schmid (PDF 124k)
Richard P. Gabriel (PDF 44k)	Pete McBreen (PDF 9k)	Ken Schwaber (PDF 89k)
Alastair Handley (PDF 69k)	Mary Poppendieck (PDF 76k)

There is also an "All-In-One" zip file available for download: (Zip 730k)

Workshop Format

The workshop is highly interactive, so the format will be an issue of the entire group. The following list is the suggestion of the organizers how to proceed:

• Introduction and name games.
• Poster session: Every participant presents her or his position statement as a poster to the rest of the group in ten minutes -- no formal presentation!
• Brainstorming and deciding on the objectives and workshop result
• Brainstorming commonalities
• Splitting up in groups
• Coming together and discussing results
• Preparing a poster session

Final Report

The workshop attendees are supposed to agree on a format for the final report. Possible choices are e.g. a pattern collection, experience reports, or stories. After the conference the report will be compiled to a 10 - 15 page available via the WWW.

About the Organizers

Jens Coldewey (jens_coldewey@acm.org) is an independent consultant from Munich, Germany, specialized in deploying object-oriented techniques and agile development in large organizations. He was program chair of the EuroPLoP '98 conference, member of the program committee of the PLoP '98, PLoP '99, and EuroPLoP '99 conference. Among others he was co-leader of the "Design for Maintenance" Workshop at OOPSLA 99, the "Deploying Lightweight Processes" at OOPSLA 2000, the ,Human Issues of Agile Processes" workshop at OOPSLA 2001 and the ,Bringing Structure to Experience" workshop at XP 2002. He writes a regular column on Agile Development in ObjektSpektrum, the German SIGS/101 magazine on OO.

Pete McBreen (petemcbreen@acm.org) is an independent consultant from Cochrane, Alberta, Canada. Pete has been quoted as saying ,If Software development is not fun, there is something wrong with the process". This reflects his personal philosophy that "the software development process must support the ways that people naturally work. Software systems are such a fundamental part of any corporation that the sustained ability to enhance and extend systems is what matters most. Truly incremental object oriented development processes are a means of achieving this goal." Pete was an co-leader of the "Design for Maintenance" Workshop at OOPSLA 99, the "Deploying Lightweight Processes" workshop at OOPSLA 2000 and the ,Human Issues of Agile Processes" workshop at OOPSLA 2001.

Klaus Marquardt (marquardt@acm.org) is lead architect at Dräger Medical AG and responsible for the architecture of a family of life-supporting systems. He is in-house consultant for software development process and components. He has introduced object-oriented methods, patterns and agile development ideas in large organizations.