The Evolution of Agile - Hannes Färberböck

In this episode Hannes Färberböck shares his rich, 20+ year history of agile and its various methodologies with us. Hannes is the Managing Director of Nagarro's Austrian operations and the had of their Testing Business Unit. He first started his journey by learning and applying Extreme Programming (XP), and then conducting trainings for other teams on XP.

Hannes recalls hearing about the first ever XP conference, where many of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto were in attendance (before it actually existed).

Looking back over time and seeing how agile has evolved, here are some of the changes that Hannes reflects on:

1. + There is more than one process you can use to be agile
2. + Companies can (and should) adapt those processes to meet their needs
3. + DevOps significantly helps reduce silos between dev teams and operations (he sees the next best version as DevTestOps).
4. Continuous Delivery: while it has the right goals, it can unintentionally turn "burndown charts" into "burnout charts" where teams never get a moment to take a breath.

To that last point, we discussed the importance of NOT ignoring or delaying your continuous improvement focus. Whether it be a technical area like refactoring code, or a more interpersonal area like building trust on the team, these things cannot be delayed because we have too many things to deliver. Instead, we need to make them a routine that becomes part of the fabric of the organization.