Dave West on the State of Scrum and the Future of Agile

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods of InfoQ, spoke to Dave West, CEO and chief product owner at Scrum.org, about the state of Scrum in 2017 and the future of agile.

Key Takeaways

• Agile adoption is now in the late-majority phase of the adoption curve; large organisations who are risk averse have seen the ideas proven elsewhere and they are adopting them
• The underlying issues are not that complicated – we’ve got customers who have needs that they can’t explain and are rapidly changing, so we need ways to deliver products and experiment rapidly to enable us to learn and adapt to the emergent needs
• The unicorn organisations are not successful because of their technology; it’s because they have served their customers better than the traditional businesses did
• The primary customers of scrum.org are professional product developers, and helping them become more professional helps ensure the products are built better
• Young enquiring minds “get” why an agile approach is the obvious way of working in today’s world
• The future of agile is about communicating in different ways to make it relevant to different people to solve their evolving and emerging problems