Last January I had a long chat with Luke Hohmann while we were both in Munich at the OOP conference. We talked about "getting beyond agile" and why we felt it was necessary and what we each had been doing that wouldn't be considered agile by some of the community and yet we both knew that these innovations were taking the industry in the right direction - the more productive, more economically successful direction. It's almost four years since I published why I was re-evaluating my Agile affiliations. I feel as strongly about this today as I did then.

My view is quite simple. There is an element of the community who want agile to be defined as a convergence of XP and Scrum and nothing more or less. They have lots of vested interest in this definition because their businesses would like to sell it to you. They are not interested in innovation. They are not interested in diverse views. And they shun other schools of thought that might also deliver a solution to the frustration of low productivity and poor industry morale that led to the Agile Manifesto. They want to eliminate competition - pure and simple. They want a homogenous definition of Agile that has everyone doing the same thing.

Meanwhile, there is a community that wants to continue to push the boundaries, to continue to innovate and to continue show greater and greater economic and social improvements in software engineering. It's this group that is feeling the need for a post-Agile movement. A movement that says, "Yes, XP and Scrum are all very well, and good, and wholesome, and we've learned many lessons from them, but there is room for new thinking, fringe ideas and innovation, and we want to continue to push the boundaries and explore scalable solutions to knowledge worker productivity in the 21st Century." That to me is getting beyond Agile. And I feel that in my work this past couple of years, I have pushed that boundary and been exploring the post-Agile world.

I loved Jason Yip's views on post-Agile. As he says "Lean is the story Agile should have been." I've felt this for several years. I've been arguing for several years that FDD was more of Lean approach than a classical agile - embrace change approach. While the likes of Ron Jeffries were arguing in my Yahoo! group that FDD wasn't agile . I was appearing in places like USC, suggesting it was Lean. The key here is that it wasn't important whether FDD was agile or not. What was important was whether it worked and whether it was producing financial, economic results coupled with social improvement for developers.

And so, the Agile tribe will gather for its annual rite of passage at Agile 2007 next month. There will be those who are in and those of us who are not in. As one of the not in you might ask me, why do I bother attending? Well its simple. Agile 2007 is the best social networking event because almost everyone goes, whether they are of the homogenous, converged Agile camp, or the heterogeneous, innovative, post-Agile camp. And so I'll hope to see you there, and I hope you'll have an open mind about what's beyond Agile and want to talk to me about something other than XP or Scrum. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean, Software+Engineering, Extreme+Programming, Scrum, Post+Agile