Exemplars

Coming soon to our agile community

We want people around the world to capture truly wonderful agile experiences – to share and let people know that agility can be achieved.

I dream that we will be able to uncover the traits that lead teams/orgs to have an environment that allows agile to flourish so that people can do joyous and meaningful work and delight the users, customers, and stakeholders.

Exemplars will help people realize that maybe where they work has a truly crazy version of “agile” going on.

The approach is for us to find and highlight such exemplars, as we are calling them. These will serve at least two purposes:

  • Act as beacons of hope

  • Be used for deeper inquiry (research)

If you know of such an exemplar, please register and contact Jon Kern.

The deeper inquiry will try and look for that which may be implicit, possibly unnoticed, and unsaid. We have likely all experienced "magic" happening, or some sort of synergy, where things are awesome, but we can't quite put our fingers on the "why." We hypothesize that skillful inquiry may bring out some nuggets of gold.

We will also likely uncover small "moves" or micro-ways of working in a given context that we will put into a pattern library. From there, folks can freely grab some techniques and try them out, or "experiment" and report back the findings.

We will (eventually) have a cadre of folks who are striving to find, inquire, and document exemplars, moves, and findings.

The Agile Manifesto gathering captured the gist of what worked to produce excellent software results — but not necessarily how the environments were created to allow novel approaches outside of the standard way. We hope this effort is a "level above" (aka, meta) the manifesto, and similarly reveals some impactful results.

We expect the following sorts of elements might describe an Exemplar:

  • Title

  • Description

  • Organization name (optional)

  • Contact (it would be good to make it non-spammable) — optionally only visible to admins and maybe folks that serve to conduct the “inquiries”

  • Some awesome write up

  • NOTE: Somehow, we need to ensure that we don’t get flooded with marketing-esque case studies. We need a way to vet the claim of being an exemplar without being too draconian.

  • Maybe a bit like Open Source projects where not all pull requests for new ideas are allowed into the core code base.