Keynote - The Agile Heart: Self-Organization and an Agile Reflection Jens Østergaard taught me that self-organization is the Agile heart, and we know that it is the essence of the Agile love affair with change. Adaptation is how we move forward and how humanity advances. But is Agile advancing the state of development practice? Even a cursory look at today's development teams shows that there is only a trace of self-organization: I have managers tell me that they "self-organize their teams" and I see teams dutifully following Scrum with all the loyalty due a methodology. I see precious little inspecting and adaption at the level that matters, the level of evolving the methods themselves. There are more provisions in CMMI for evolving it (kind of a reflection API) than there are in Scrum or XP. Too many who follow an Agile approach do so because it makes it unnecessary to self-organize. Too many who are leading the Agile agendas feel that the way to keep it alive is to keep things just as they are - just like the dinosaurs said. If we apply Agile values and thinking to the past thirty years of software experience we see not constant improvement, but rather cycles. Object Orientation was the first attempt to break down monolithic structures and honor the human element through anthropomorphic design; case tools eventually won out. The same people made another assault on the industry with Christopher Alexander's human agenda of design; the good drove out the perfect, and the bad and the ugly ensued. Now we pursue the human agenda under the Agile banner. Are we done? Can we retire? Will we win? Or will we suffer another reset with The Next Movement After Agile? The key to survival is Agile Reflection: the ability of methods to introspect and adapt. Back