The Agile Alliance

The meeting happened at Snowbird, Utah in February 2001.

The 17 people were Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Robert C. Martin, Stephen J. Mellor, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, and Dave "Pragmatic" Thomas. (If Dave A. Thomas from Object Technology International had been able to make it that week, we might have had two Dave Thomases as signatories!)

Each person there saw his own version of the meeting. What follows in this appendix is mine (but I did pass this text in front of the others).

The reason we met was to see whether there was anything in common among the various light methodologies: Adaptive Software Development, XP, Scrum, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM), and "pragmatic programming."

Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, Ron Jef-fries, James Grenning, and Robert Martin brought their views of XP, along with their considerable other experiences and their own personal wishes.

Martin Fowler brought long experience in both XP and methodology evaluation in general.

Jim Highsmith represented Adaptive Software Development and ideas around the emergent properties of complex, adaptive systems.

I was there protecting my interests in methodology-per-project and just-in-time methodology construction.

Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, and Mike Beedle represented Scrum (Schwaber 2002).

Jon Kern of TogetherSoft represented Feature-Driven Development, the method described in Java Modeling in Color with UML (Coad 1999).

Arie van Bennekum, from the Netherlands, represented DSDM (Stapleton 1997).

Andy Hunt and Dave "Pragmatic" Thomas, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer, protected the interests of experienced programmers who have no affiliation with any one method.

Brian Marick represented the software-testing perspective.

Stephen J. Mellor was there to protect his interests in model-driven development. He was perhaps the most surprised to find himself able to agree with most of what was said and signed both the manifesto and the principles.

There were others who had been invited, and would certainly have contributed and signed, but those listed are the people who were there and who argued about, crafted, and signed the agreements.

We hoped against hope that we would actually agree on something.

None of us was interested in merging the practices to create a "Unified Light Methodology" (ULM). Given the individualism in the room, it was actually surprising that we agreed on anything.

We agreed on four things:

• We agreed at the first level, on the need to respond to change. We agreed that agile reflected our intent and permits discussion of heavier-agile methodologies for larger and life-critical projects.

• We agreed at the second level, on four core values as described in the manifesto.

• We agreed at the third level (just barely), on 12 more detailed statements consistent with those four values.

• It was clear that we would not agree on the fourth level, detailed project tactics. We did agree that this was healthy for the industry and that we should continue to innovate and compete in the world of ideas, to discover a larger set of agile software practices.

With those agreements and the adoption of the term agile, the 17 people created the Agile Alliance.