A couple of years ago as I was wandering into work one morning I read a tweet from Ron Jeffries which seemed to sum up my feeling about agile software development after years of working as a developer, team leader, coach, etc. in the space:

In many places I had seen (and in some cases sadly contributed to) weak or cargo cult agile development. The only times I had seen it really fly was when people were committed to it and willing to put a lot of effort into getting it right and keeping it going. In those cases they achieved the kind of simplicity that only comes from a lot of hard work.

For over a year it has lurked on the edge of my consciousness and last week at XP Manchester I got the chance to gather my thoughts around it and deliver them as a lightning talk. So thanks to Ron for the inspiration and thanks to the Laserform Hub team at Advanced Legal for allowing me to illustrate the people involved via photos of them in action!

Courtesy of Andy Grant, the video is here: https://youtu.be/nDSN_8MlEUU

And the slides are here: