An international Agile conference happens in Chicago, does anyone notice, or care? Seriously, what a bore.  For years we enjoyed attending the Agile conference but it's become such a rerun there's no point in going anymore, let alone blowing the usual $70K we spend on it.

If you doubt me, read the conference program: 

Compare 2009 against last year, or the year before, or the year before that.  Nothing ever changes, it's the same worn out people and worn out jibber jabber we've sat through since the days of OOPSLA.  Yes, it has those book club celebrities we all love. Yes, there are always a few new faces trying to impress the old guard with populist insights.  Yes, there's an ever present contingent of eager Europeans who seem to think a bunch of content-free North American academics and gray haired hippies on oxygen walkers can teach them something useful.  And while the masses learned to spell Kanban at an Agile conference (even if we can't pronounce it), be honest, is Agile a hotbed of anything relevant or innovative?

At least SXSW has the good taste to make getting bombed part of the show.

The "stages" at Agile2009 are platforms for Scrum/XP topics.  The one supposedly forward aiming stage, called "Agile Frontier", entices attendees with such leading edge topics as "New Approaches to Risk Management", "Big Balls of Mud", or "Working with large backlogs". 

Gee guys, is that the best you've got? Hold me back while I contemplate being surrounded for three days by people who still think "risk management" is leading edge.  Why not pass out Xanax tablets and be done?

What, no burning man?

The Agile2009 program actually lists three or four separate sessions on how to prioritize a backlog.  Wow!  Does that come with a laxative?  Come on, is it that hard to prioritize backlog?  No wonder so many Agile projects are in trouble, they're all constipated.  Where do people work that they need to be taught to prioritize?  Isn't prioritization kind of like breathing, aren't you born with the ability?  Guess not.

All this focus on managing risks and backlog, yet the Agile community has deliberately closed its eyes to product Design (design with a capital "D"), and therefore failed to notice that all the action is at the Front End of Innovation, not the Back-End where Agile lives.  To be fair, Agile does a fantastic job at back-end innovation...no gripes there, but when a project innovates at the front-end there's never any worry about prioritizing.  Silly rabbit. Didn't you get the memo?  It's all about the funnel.

That said, I might not like the conference but I still love Agile.  Our company will continue to use major pieces of Agile on software projects until the end of time, it's not a fad - it's part of any good software house.  It's just not transformative anymore.

Agile is yesterday - hit save on the good parts and move on. 
- Continuous Integration & Continuous Automated Testing, save
- Working software instead of big binder of stuff up front, save
- Iterative versus stage gate progress milestones, save
- Back-end innovation with customer participation, save
- Treat programmers nice, save
- Pick on traditional testers, save

Agile principles and practices are cool but where's the hot action in software?  Today it's all about innovation.  It's about what you can build for a customer that they never dreamt was possible.  A lot of that innovation arrives through Design.  Modern software Designers want people to love our products, not just sign-off in acceptance of them.  Being able to write great code quickly is a requirement for the job, the stuff Agile brings has become an expectation, not a feature.  If you can't bring game they'll find ten others who can. 

Since I mentioned Design, please don't start thinking it's all about User Experience either. Great product Design is about more than just User Experience.  While I'm thrilled to see User Experience getting serious keynote attention at Agile, Ux is just one aspect of Design.  Product Design is bigger than that, it's about deliberate repeatable innovation and altering culture by changing how people view their jobs, leisure time, and life. Products help define each generation.  Design defines products.

At Agile2010 I expect attendees will no doubt be busy trying to figure out how to arrange Kanban cards on a wall so as to integrate with Buxton-style Ux sketches... I'm sure that will be fun for them.  Back in the real world the serious players will be inventing new products by applying techniques pioneered in the planet's most competitive industries that rely on constant innovation for differentiation.  The software professionals who learn to perfect the funnel at the front end of innovation will enjoy life as market leaders, innovators, and game changers.  Sadly, those who pause too long to absorb simple back-end tricks will become the new blue collar workers as the rest of the globe makes software development a commodity.

I had hoped Agile would become a generational software conference where great creators of software would get together each year to share discoveries and insights.  Instead, it's just another place where people who build a tiny amount software but write a lot of books can congregate to promote their celebrity status among the gullible.  The Agile conference has become another OOPSLA; a single-theme conference that will expire with the times.  Long live contravariant polymorphism!

So, good luck and goodbye Agile Conference!

Hope to see the best of you at shows that are a little more...well...driven to innovate!

A parting tip: If you want to run a great software conference, require all presenters to have released a product or major update within the previous year or so.  Rather than submitting abstracts...how about submitting software titles?  If your biography doesn't start with "I built..." then how else are you to be judged? After all, it is a "software" conference, right?