The speaker: Jurgen Appelo
The talk: “So Now You’re an Agilist. What’s Next?”

Jurgen Appelo, “So Now You’re an Agilist. What’s Next?”, Agileee conference, 2009 from Alexey Krivitsky on Vimeo.

Jurgen Appelo
The Netherlands, @ISM eCompany

Jurgen Appelo is Chief Information Officer at ISM eCompany (www.ism.nl), recently rated as the #1 fastest growing technology company in The Netherlands. He leads a horde of 50 software developers, development managers, project managers, consultants, quality assurance managers, service managers and kangaroos, some of which he hired accidentally.

Jurgen is primarily interested in software engineering, quality improvement and complexity theory, from a manager’s perspective. He is trying to write a book about this, and he keeps track of it on his blog (www.noop.nl). He has already published a number of papers and articles in several magazines, like Dr. Dobb’s, Software Quality Professional, Methods & Tools, The Software Practitioner, StickyMinds, Software Development Network, Computable and Automatisering Gids. However, sometimes he puts it all aside to do some intensive programming himself, or to spend some time on his ever-growing collection of science fiction and fantasy literature. Jurgen lives in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) — and sometimes in Brussels (Belgium) — with his partner Raoul. He has two kids, and an imaginary hamster called George.

Talk: So Now You’re an Agilist. What’s Next?

Doing projects better doesn’t stop at agile. In this session I attempt to distill new advances in software development from the field of complexity science.

Complexity science is the study of complex systems, like ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, etc. “Complexity science” is the scientific approach to “systems thinking”. It can be used to understand and explain why complex systems behave the way they do. Ken Schwaber, Jim Highsmith and other experts have explained in their books that a lot of agile concepts have been copied from the study of complex systems. However, agile software development has not covered all there is to learn.

I will show why practices must be agile (self-organized) *and* formal (controlled), why any software development method is doomed to fail, why managing scope is a too simplistic interpretation of the principle of “embracing change”, why most process improvement initiatives are linear and wrong, and why some sets of practices will be show chaotic behavior when combined.

I will go a step further than what has already been described in mainstream literature, linking some of complexity theory with down-to-earth experience from the trenches in my role as chief information officer for a software development company.

The session is intended for those who already know many (agile and formal) concepts and practices, and want to hear some additional ideas that they can try to translate to their own projects.