In the background, the debate with the Agile 2009 Conference committee has been continuing since I raised my disappointment with the announced program. Olav Maassen and Eric Willeke have stepped forward and proposed an Agile Fringe stage that would encompass the ideas of the Breaking Acts and Questioning Agile stages from the 2008 event. However, the organizers are pushing back claiming both a lack of space and lack of need. Amhed Sidky is arguing that the existing program can accommodate the types of new ideas and agile skeptic proposals that the Fringe stage would actively solicit. I believe that the Agile Alliance and the Agile 2009 conference committee led by Johanna Rothman with program chair Ahmed Sidky need convincing of both the purpose, value and strength of support for an Agile Fringe stage within the main conference. So I am posting here an open letter to Johanna and Ahmed. If you agree with the sentiment in this letter I would like you to sign it by leaving a comment. Thanks.

Dear Johanna and Ahmed,

I greatly value the contribution you make to our community giving your time and energy to facilitate the gathering of our community of peers at Agile 2009. The Agile conference is the public face of the Agile Alliance to the wider community of software developers and technology industry professionals. So you have taken on positions of great responsibility. Your decisions about the conference send a public message to the wider professional community about the Agile Alliance and what it values. I strongly believe that the Agile Alliance values innovation, openness and objective debate about better ways of building software. I believe it is important that the Agile Alliance shows leadership and stands by those values and protects innovation, and shows openness through Devil's advocacy by giving these topics specific space in the conference program. Two members of the Agile Alliance, Olav Maassen and Eric Willeke have proposed an Agile Fringe stage for the conference program to serve this purpose. I commend this idea to you and I hope that you both appreciate its value and show good leadership and judgment through its inclusion in the program.

Ahmed has argued in private email that such a stage is not required. He argues that the existing program can accommodate new ideas such as Real Option Theory or ideas which engender skepticism amongst the agile community such as Agile+CMMI. He also argues that the theme of this year's program is to have domain specific stages e.g., a testing stage, a developer stage, a product management stage, and so forth, and that cross-cutting stage concepts are not part of the plan for Agile 2009. He argues that an Agile Fringe stage would be cross-cutting and therefore doesn't fit neatly with the pattern. He continues that any submission for a Fringe stage could easily be accommodated in one of the domain specific stages. And further, that the review committees for these stages are open-minded, experienced professionals capable of judging submissions each on their own merits. That the open nature of the submission system will give innovative new ideas a fair shake and that there is no need for a specific stage to provide a home for emerging concepts or skeptical challenges to agile values, beliefs and practices. I would contend that this opinion is wrong-headed and not supported by history from previous conferences.

Others have argued that the open space area is all that is needed to accommodate innovative ideas and skeptical dissent. While there is truth to this I would argue that open space is not enough.

If we look at the emergence of kanban as a case study, kanban first started as a single open space at Agile 2007. At Agile 2008, there were 6 kanban presentation by other presenters, some of whom had been present at the open space session the year before. Almost all of those 6 kanban presentations appeared on the Breaking Acts stage. If Breaking Acts had not been present, it is likely that many of the kanban submissions would have been rejected. Rejected for entirely explainable human reasons. Rejected because they wouldn't be interesting to a wide audience. Rejected because the reviewer didn't know about or understand this new technique and found it confusing, threatening, or simply not interesting. As Chris Matts pointed out during the open review period for Agile 2008 in response to a reviewer comment, "we have 5 submissions about the specifics of prioritizing the Sprint backlog in Scrum, surely we have room for one more presentation on kanban...?" New things get rejected by reviewers looking for the familiar and the safe. Without a specific category for the new and challenging, it's human nature to go with familiar safe choice.

A second valuable case study from Agile 2008 would be the treatment of submissions related to CMMI and organizational maturity. Many of the review comments were based on ignorance, fear and loathing and certainly not objective in nature. The treatment of the submissions and the submitters was often shameful and reflected poorly on us as a community and on the individuals making the submissions. I used my status in the community to dedicate a section of my main stage speech to the topic of Agile and CMMI. Afterwards, I received many positive comments and emails from regular attendees who were amazed that no one else was talking about it. This shows us that reviewers don't often reflect the true concerns of the attendees. Reconciling agile methods with CMMI has become a hot topic outside Agile Alliance circles this year and the program for the Software Engineering Institute's SEPG conference in March 2009 contains many presentations on Lean, Agile and CMMI including some from people who presented on the Agile 2008 Breaking Acts stage and some from those who were vitriolically rejected through the Agile 2008 submission system. Again, history would indicate that the existing program selection and review system for the Agile conference does not produce the right results.

While I have chosen to highlight Agile+CMMI and Real Option Theory as topics I believe would find a home on an Agile Fringe stage, I believe there must be several more out there, perhaps from people we've never yet heard of? How do we provide them with an audience and a hearing? If we allow the program to be driven by popular democracy we will always be trending towards the middle, the mediocre and the status quo. We will be reinforcing a narrow definition of agile and sending a message to our community that outsiders with new ideas are unwelcome.

I find Ahmed's attitude to be academic and unrealistic. It relies on the process and removes focus from the people. His argument that all the submissions for Breaking Acts in 2008 could have been accommodated on other stages might be valid in theory but in practice they would never have been accepted. In the agile community we should know better than this. We value individuals and their interactions more than we value processes and tools. Ahmed is asking me to put my faith in the review process and the online review tool. I prefer to put my faith in human nature. If we do not provide a stage that explicitly solicits innovation, skepticism and ideas from outside the established and accepted notion of agile methods, we will have a conference devoid of significant discontinuous innovation. I would surmise that we have an echo chamber.

I truly hope that you will find a way to adjust the program to include the Agile Fringe stage.

Best regards,

David Technorati tag: Agile+2009, Agile+Chicago, Agile+Alliance, David+Anderson, Eric+Willeke, Olav+Maassen, Johanna+Rothman