First, you write, “the Agile conference was created by merging two earlier conferences a few years ago, one primarily related to XP and one primarily related to Scrum”. I don’t know if he really said that or not — I truly hope he didn’t.

I am the person who organized the “other” conference, and had a bitter fight with the XP Universe guys, because we wanted a conference that was “methodology neutral.” It was not allowed to have XP in the name, or Scrum in the name, or Crystal in the name, or DSDM in the name. It was to cater to all methodologies and all people in all methodologies. It was deliberately attempting to get away from named methodologies as attractors.

Bob Martin knows this, because when we talked about merging the conferences, the only sticking point in the discussions was that Bob Martin insisted that the word “XP” be included in the title, and that violated the basic premises of the “Agile Development Conference” and our wishes for any merged conference. Because they wanted to change the name of the conference for the merged conference, they couldn’t call it “Agile Development Conference”, so it became this annual “Agile 20xx” name.

Anyway, I don’t know if he really said what you cite him as saying, or not, or if he said it for audience effect in his talk. Either way, it is historically incorrect.

For the last part, the 5th value, the agile manifesto already contains this: “Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.”

In other words, “don’t produce crap” is already in there. An additional value is not needed.

On the other hand, I did hear a group produce an interesting proposal for a fifth value, which I rather like: “We value the agile principles over the agile practices.”

Alistair

The main point Bob was raising was to do Test Driven Development.

His humorous comparison of Scrum and Xtreme Programming was not highly critical of either, but mostly in fun. He was not saying Scrum and XP aren’t effective.

His main point was whether you are doing scrum or XP or something else, if you aren’t doing Test Driven Development you aren’t behaving professionally as a developer, and it is on the order of a doctor saying he didn’t have time to wash his hands.

Powerful stuff.