The Agile20Reflect festival are delighted to be hosting this event as part of their vision to mark the 20th anniversary of the festival as they remember and celebrate the life and work of the co-author of the manifesto the late Mike Beedle.

One of Mike’s friends, Brad Appleton, will open a circle to discuss Mike’s work and passions and his part in bringing people into Agile.

Everyone is welcome!

If you have pictures, links or videos in memory of Mike please do share the with Brad at brad{AT}bradapp{DOT}net

Here is an extract from Mike Beedle’s Wikipedia page. He was a remarkable man:

He was the co-author of the first book and earliest papers about Scrum.

Later he coined the term “Enterprise Scrum”, developed his ideas into a canvases-based approach, and promoted Enterprise Scrum as a framework for scaling the practices and benefits of Scrum across entire organizations.

Agile Manifesto

In 2001 Beedle was one of the seventeen people who created and signed the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. He had been invited by Martin Fowler and Robert C. Martin because of his involvement in the early adoption of Scrum and the organizational patterns community. Beedle was one of the first to follow in implementing Scrum after Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, and collaborated on writing the Scrum patterns article, which was the second published paper on Scrum.

The Agile Uprising podcast has published an interview with Beedle from Snowbird ski resort, where he collaborated on the creation of the Agile Manifesto. (http://podcast.agileuprising.com/tribute-to-mike-beedle-agile-manifesto-signer/)

Scrum
He was the second adopter of Scrum, and contributed to the framework development by implementing into his companies and coaching other organizations in the same direction.

The main idea behind Scrum was to create a team that would resemble artificial life, a robot, or an adaptive system, that would adapt and learn through “social intelligence”. Mike Beedle had a Ph. D. in Physics, and his master’s thesis was about chaotic and non-linear systems. Joining this two concepts was what allowed Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland and Mike Beedle to point about “creating a team at the edge of chaos”. Both directions pointed to the same end game: creating a hyper-productive team that worked as an adaptive system at the edge of chaos through patterns.

In 2001, Beedle worked with Ken Schwaber to describe the method in the book, Agile Software Development with Scrum.[7] Scrum’s approach to planning and managing product development involves bringing decision-making authority to the level of operation properties and certainties.

We hope you’ll come join us to honour his memory and contributions to the Agile industry.

Our hanks to Brad for helping make this event possible.