The Covert Agilist

A team of consultants introduces agile software development practices in an ldquoagile hostilerdquo environment. This paper describes the chain of events that allowed them to covertly introduce and exercise agile practices. There were three distinctly different coaching approaches at play, and it was the combination of the three that resulted in successes. Enterprise change requires more than a single win, however, and lack of top-down support prevented wider scale adoption of agile practices.