I had a call with a customer in the mobile space and he wanted to know what other companies did to release mobile apps faster. After talking with him I said it sounds like he was doing all the right things and so what was bothering him? It turns out that his IT people were telling him he was not doing Agile the right way. His group was not conforming to the standards of other groups in the organization. Oh my God ... have you not read the Agile Manifesto and do you understand it? It sounds like this company has just replaced waterfall with the Agile process.
When companies talk about what they're doing at Agile 2017, what are we going to hear? Hammond: There are three phases of Agile maturity. The first phase I see are shops which do Agile by process. They are all about the process of Scrum or XP or SAFE. It was supposed to enable developers to get results by empowering or enhancing them. Part of the original Agile Manifesto said companies need to do what works or what is in demand in today world, measure the results and trust on the people is not the Agile process. The second phases is. There are shops that are Agile by practice. These companies more fully conform to the Agile idea. They're various organizationwith minimum viable product and design thinking and they're borrowing tactics from different places. If it works they adopt them. They are just trying to deliver good software as fast as they can with processes that work for their Agile teams. Different teams get different results from the same practice and that's a hard thing for large companies or a small organization that want to standardize everything. As you can take an example of the way movies are made, every director does it differently in their own individual way. The important thing is to be focused on the results and not on the processes.
The third level of Agile is the companies that do it in spirit. They're not worried what to call it. Instead they're focused on the culture and building cross- functional teams where developers sit with digital people and business people and they hire top talent. When you look at how these companies work they wouldn't think not doing anything other than two to three week sprints or not instrumenting an app. Keeping developers separate from the business is not how these big organization work. They create tribes, have dinner and lunch at the office so developers show up at 9 a.m. and are still there at 7 p.m. It's a social culture, as well as a work culture. It's like this: When a group started it wasn't trying to do Agile, it was trying to solve a problem and when the problem was solved they suddenly realized they were doing Agile. They weren't focused on the process or the execution; they were focused on solving the problem.

They're really important now. And let's think a little bit more about how we enable more people to develop
software. There's a huge developer shortage out there and we need to think how we rationalize low-code platforms with the Agile methodology and the delivery process. Seems like there are a lot of opportunities to evolve Agile, but they don't happen. We have more folks focused on process purity and differences than results.
And there are other new things from DevOps to serverless architectures to Kubernetes -- all of these help develop software faster so Agile needs to take advantage of all these new and advanced technologies. We need to be much more experimental and work toward unplanned innovation. It's not about 'Agile only' now. If someone said to me I wasn't doing Agile the right way I'd walk out of the room. It misses the whole point of the Manifesto, which puts people over process. What they can do to work more effectively as a team to deliver software is what matters.