Agile is STILL a Dirty Word! by James Birnie

Last year at Devoxx Belgium I presented Agile is a Dirty Word for the first time. Since then it has become my most consistently successful talk with its mixture of dry humour, real life anecdotes and tales of dysfunctional business that every audience can relate to. When I first gave that talk it was intended as a bit of a lament against all the bad implementations of Agile that I've come across in my career as a consultant and I touched upon a couple of techniques that I was experimenting with at the time. A year on and I have put into practice some of my own suggested techniques and I've been involved in some stunningly successful transformation work. This talk is not just a lament against dysfunction (although there will be a bit of that still) but it is now a playbook of practical steps that can be used to effect lasting change in any organisation. James has worked in software since the 1990s when TDD was something you studied but never did, pipelines were for carrying oil and "Agile" and "Lean" were words used for describing athletes. James worked for 9 years in a startup where he learned the hard way about CI, CD and splitting the monolith. In 2015 he started a new life as a consultant, spending 4 wonderfully happy years at ThoughtWorks. In July 2019, he started a new adventure at Codurance where he is a champion of software excellence through solving the organisational problems.