Top Agile Trends

Being Agile, not just Doing Agile, that's the trend.

We’re living in an interesting time, with the exponential growth of information and disruptive technologies; the foundation for a quantitative leap is building up. Now it’s clear that Agile is turning into a mainstream methodology, what are the Agile trends in the upcoming new year?

Distributed Agile development - agile teams not collocated in one place, but distributed geographically. Distributed work is where there are whole, cross-functional teams in various locations, each of which is capable of taking on some work items and delivering complete work. It takes process maturity for agile programming -- guiding principles that help in understanding how agile and efficient your process is. 

Agile at Scale: Scalable agile is an agile software development process that refers to the ability to manage large projects with multiple teams, or the collaboration between multiple agile teams for large projects - Scrum of Scrums. It requires considerably more understanding of what is appropriate; there can be no "out-of-the-box" solution. Agile practices will be used at business level too-not only for development projects. Business epics (demand management) will be managed by agile practices, using a Kanban board to follow up business demands' evaluation workflow and provide full traceability of execution of demand

DevOps, with the goal of extending lean/Agile end to end, from an idea to production, will become a major channel for existing organizations that are trying to become Agile. It seems to offer the most promising method of breaking Agile out of the development ghetto by explicitly involving Ops without the "Development Uber Alles" mentality that early Agile initiatives are prone to and provides an acceptable banner for other organizations to join the parade. Agile will applied in areas where it has not gone before.

Agile Process Maturity: Agile quality assurance and control concepts will continue to mature. Currently many equate quality with testing as focus in agile is on working product. This will change as more emphasis is placed on process control and other product attributes (usability, maintainability, goodness of fit, etc.). More applications areas will be addressed that will stimulate the continued growth and maturity of agile methods.

"Build the right thing" along with "building it right". More emphasis will be placed on the practice rather than dogma. What works will replace what is fashionable and theologically correct. Talent recruiting is less dependent on certifications and more dependent on skill and reputation. That means leveling up agile teams on:
- Customer Development
- Business Model Generation
- Lean Canvas
- Lean Startup
- Experiment Design 

From doing Agile to being agile, for the first time since the industrial revolution, indeed, it’s a digital transformation, you’re beginning to see significant competition to the corporate *structure*. There’s an increase in interdisciplinary connection with those who understand culture. Agile and the Information Economy are accidentally working hand-in-hand to challenge the very understanding of how to run a business, not just "how to write software”. We will hopefully stop defining systems-thinking as production-line models in purely IT terms and address the human component as well

More metrics and measurement will be applied to provide evidence that business goals are being met by agile projects, stakeholders are satisfied, techniques are working and business value is being generated. Measurement will help show what works and value will become quantified rather than theoretically. Use of metrics will be an enabler with adaptation of statistical process control and measurement

Fundamentally the trend is shifting from dong Agile to being agile. at its core, agile is a mindset.

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