pillarcon 2016

Agile used to be a descriptive term with real value; today it's mostly a meaningless buzzword like "synergy" or "leverage." Almost every development shop these days claims to be Agile, although we frequently discover later that those claims are very far from the truth.

What's a poor consultant to do? Isn't there a better way to tell whether a shop is Agile than simply to accept its self-description at face value?

Yes, there is. It's a very simple single-number metric that's nearly impossible to game. In this talk we'll explore it and its implications.