Agile an Unexpected Journey Sabrina C E Bruce and Karl Smith

Agile an Unexpected Journey A Compendium of Agile Biographies

April 29, 2021 Article

Agile an Unexpected Journey: A Compendium of Agile Biographies

This idea for this book Agile an Unexpected Journey was simple in 2020 I thought about how could I celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the signing of the Agile Manifesto in February 2021? Easy I hear you say, not so easy in fact pretty hard to do, because of LIFE, it gets in the way. I mean it’s fun and vital, but it does get in the way.

The Idea

The idea of the book is to share practitioners’ experiences, their journey in Agile, their pivotal moments and what they learned to evolve their practice. Think of it as their Agile Biography in 6-10 pages of A4 for brevity.

I stated that “while I may come back to the authors regarding the content with some questions, I won’t edit their experience”. The book is not trying to prove anything so there will be no additions to their content. The book is focused on People as Agile focuses on People.

Unexpected Journey Questions Framework (writing style to be informal)

1. How did you hear about Agile and how did you first get involved?
2. What was your first experience of applying Agile and what did you learn?
3. How has your experience and practice of Agile evolved?
4. Can you share any pivotal work or case studies?
5. Where do you go from here?
6. At the end, please put in any details you want to promote or point to in terms of links.

The Opportunity and Impediments

I started this in July 2020 and with a bit of effort it will go out in April 2021, having missed three delivery dates. The reason for the missed deliveries was my involvement in The Agile20Reflect Festival which I will go into in my chapter (Karl Smith) because it has become a major part of my Agile Biography. Sadly, there are many more people who I invited to be involved than could provide their content, but as my intention is to republish every year, they now have eleven months to pull their chapter together.

Chapter Order

Someone may have noticed that the chapters are not in alphabetical order. No, they are in the order I got them from the Authors. I don’t really see why such an arbitrary thing as name should determine order in anything, yet it so often does. Well not here.