Brian Marick Proposes Refocusing the Agile Alliance

Posted by Geoffrey Wiseman on May 23, 2007

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In response to his "disquiet in the state of Agile", Brian Marick proposed a refocusing of the Agile Alliance. After Rachel Davies stepped down from being the chair of the Agile Alliance, Marick ran on the platform of following through on his proposal, and was elected.

He'll be working on "some derivative" of this proposal at the Agile Software Development Forum to prepare for a vote of the membership.

Briefly, the original proposal suggested a refocus with a two year span:

• Focusing on helping the agile team succeed, rather than the organization/business as a whole:

  'Members of the Agile team' is defined to be everyone who'd be expected to attend a team standup meeting: programmers, testers, user experience designers, Scrum product owners or XP Customers, technical writers, and so on.

• Contribution to the agile community as a prerequisite for membership.

• Funding small conferences dedicating to advancing the practice:

  We hope to fund at least five conferences a year, in at least three continents. The Agile Alliance will choose conferences to fund based on bids by groups of volunteers.

• Aiding members when they are unable to reconcile the interests of the members with the interests of individuals within their organization:

  While the Agile Alliance is not a union, it will intervene on behalf of members, whether by providing a supportive outside voice, aiding exiting employees in job searches, removal of a company from a list of known-good employers, other methods we haven't thought of yet, or any combination of the above.

• Spending down the Agile Alliance surplus over two years by soliciting requests from Agile user groups.

• Evaluating the success of the refocused Alliance after those the two years span:

  There will be a careful evaluation of whether the Agile Alliance has, in fact, improved the success rate of Agile teams over what it would otherwise have been. The evaluation will include people in the role of Devil's Advocate. Unless the evaluation concludes that the Alliance is making a substantial difference in the world, the Alliance will disband, distributing any remaining monies to user groups.

Brian Marick is looking for help to "stir things up". Join in the conversation, add your voice, and follow along at InfoQ.

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