The Agile Man-ifesto
I have observed recently that of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto, 17 are men, and the rest are women. This made me think about the relevance of the manifesto, in terms of the intellectual, emotional, and cultural diversity that led to its creation.
I searched if someone else has published articles or works on this interesting fact, that all the signatories are male, and did not find anything about it. I did find, however, and the article Empower Gender Diversity with Agile Software Development by Prof. Orit Hazzan The paper shows that teams with mixed genders present better communication skills and better relationships. Furthermore, gender diversity in teams and in pairs resulted in members significantly reporting on more collaborative work. Did anyone mention Individuals and Interactions?
The Agile Manifesto source: http://agilemanifesto.org
The paper refers to additional work, and lays ground for future empirical work on the contribution of gender diversity on trust within teams, enhancing cross-functional teamwork and other aspects. This all suggests that encouraging women leadership and involving women in development teams enhances organizations’ ability to produce more and better quality software for their customers.
This got me intrigued. I browsed renowned agile books written be women: Johanna Rothman, Esther Derby, Diana Larsen, Lyssa Adkins – all books I found were published during or after 2001! (Admittedly this was not an extensive research only browsing in online bookshops)
Even the references in Prof. Hazzan’s article above – all referenced papers by herself were published after 2001.
I then contacted Prof. Hazzan and asked her if she has noticed this, and whether she knows of work done in this respect.
The answer came quickly: Read more…
Becoming agile 