Are agile organisations really inclusive? Surely, given the fundamental principle of “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and the fact that almost every agile approach embeds collaborative practices, the answer should be yes. And yet, the lived experience of many people contradicts this. Putting these assumptions and hypotheses to the test, the Business Agility Institute undertook an ambitious, year-long, research project and heard from 500 people globally.

What we found is that there is a lack of understanding about diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I). Many people shared their personal experiences about feeling excluded or knew of others who had been. In most cases, DE&I was not part of the agile transformation designs; for either employees or customers.

In 2021, we have the opportunity to rethink our approach to DE&I in agile organisations and learn from those organizations who, as we discovered in our research, are intentionally designing their new ways of working to be inclusive. As thought leaders and change makers, we want to share ways you can make a difference to people in your team and create an organisation where everyone can belong. Impacting not only your employee experience but your customers' experience and how you serve your community.

Deanna Spowart and Ashay Saxena, lead researchers on the project, will present the findings of their research “Are agile organisations really inclusive?” In the broader context, Deanna will share practical guidance on being an inclusive team member and Ashay will share what the agile organisations need to do embrace inclusion.

Over the last decade, organisations have embraced agile approaches in a bid to uncover "better ways of developing software". Agile has fast-become the norm for software development owing to its credibility to be able to deliver continuous business value to the customer. Despite the promise, there are several grey areas expressed with the specific approaches (be it Scrum, XP et al) as well as ways in which teams practice them at a project level. Subsequently, several concerns have been raised by the practitioners. Consultants, Coaches and Researchers constantly dwell on these aspects and make an attempt to provide solutions to these existing challenges.

A succinct account of the status-quo is that practice has led research in the domain. However, there has been recent surge of Agile research playing catch-up with the various facets of Agile practice. This session shall dwell on the present state of Agile research. The issues and challenges concerning Agile research shall be presented. A brief discussion, in the form of "chit-chat", shall ensue to possibly lay out a bright future for Agile research. 

The need of the hour for almost any software organization today is being or doing Agile. It helps organizations deliver continuous business value to the customer. At the same time, some organizations may need to embrace distributed teams, working from multiple sites on a project, to capture global talent and leverage expertise at different locations.

In present times, software organizations are making a sincere attempt to successfully deliver projects following the distributed-agile approach. However, ‘Agile' and ‘ Distributed' seems to be at two opposite ends of a continuum, in terms of demands for flexibility and control to the approach of software development. In such a scenario, how does one manage to work with this approach in harmony?

We made an attempt to understand the drivers that leads to effective balance between the tenets of distributedness and agility in a software development team. Our research lead us to one of the leading agile practitioners viz. ThoughtWorks in a bid to uncover the mechanisms followed in their distributed agile projects. We interviewed several people in their organization including Developers, QA, Business Analysts, Project Leads and Managers working on a project to figure out just what makes distributed agile project(s) tick.

Our findings have led us to believe that the creation of a unique 'project context' is essential to effectively balance the conflicting requirements of distributed and agile development. Our objective is to share these findings with the agile community. We hope that our insights will help other agile practitioners working with distributed teams to execute their work more efficiently and effectively. 

Moreover, we would also dwell on the case study research approach to help agile researchers carry them out in a convincing manner. In particular, we shall focus on the process of site selection, data collection and analysis which could lead to good insights from the “field" on the researchers’ topic.