Sustainability becomes more and more a success factor for every company: For finding and keeping both clients as well as talent. Many companies are using agile development already successfully. Thus, leveraging agility for greater sustainability seems to be a promising approach. This is the topic, I’m exploring together with various colleagues.

Want to know where you and your team stand and how you can reach greater sustainability?

Take the Agile Sustainability Assessment and start improving, one step at a time. And/or drop us a note to learn more about how far you got or how you and your ecosystem can benefit even more from implementing agile sustainability.

Do you want to make a difference and don’t know where to start?

Check out the Agile Sustainability Initiative! this Agile Alliance initiative aims to increase the awareness of the Agile community’s possibilities to make a difference.

Our work is based on the United Nations‘ Agenda 2030 which aims for  17 sustainable development goals. These goals are focusing on the following three areas, as defined also by the Triple Bottom Line:

– Social (People): Aiming for equity, health, and livability
– Environmental (Planet): Protecting the planet
– Economic (Prosperity): Improving the lives & prospects of everyone, everywhere

The Agile Manifesto can be used as a guide for taking the environmental, social, and economic footprint of products (and their creation) into account. We use a workshop format to explore how the principles can contribute to your organization’s sustainability, and how a greater awareness can change your current way of working and contribute to increasing sustainability.

*I am trained as a pollution control commissioner on ecological environmentalism and Dr. Claudia Melo has worked as an Agile Coach/Software Engineer for the United Nations, she is now Director of Engineering & Tech Organizational Design at Loft.

Links to articles & recordings

As I’m meanwhile speaking mostly on sustainability, please find the upcoming events here and the past sessions on the topic there.

Articles, Books, Podcasts

– The Planet is Silently Screaming. Pair-written with John Buck. Published by the newly created We Hope magazine.
– Contributed paper on Connecting Agile with Theory of Change with Steve Holyer (published with Springer in Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, 2023)
– Video chat with Claudia Melo on Sustainability in Software Development with Agile Testing Fellow (that is Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory).
– Podcast (with Steve Holyer & Claudia Melo) on the creation of the Agile Sustainability assessment with Comparative Agility.
– Experience report (in relation to XP 2022) with Steve Holyer on: How Agile Can Make a Difference for Climate Action and Sustainability.
– Agile’s impact on Global Sustainability, hosted by Robin Woods, Unlocking Agile
– Klima-Panel zusammen mit Marina Köhn und Max Schulze (Panel on Climate Change in German), gehosted von Eberhard Wolff, Software Architektur im Stream
– Leveraging the Agile Manifesto for More Sustainability . Article published by infoQ.
– Sustainability: Delivering Agility’s Promise (pre-printed draft), chapter in Software Sustainability edited by Coral Calero et.al and published by Springer International Publishing, 2021
– How Software Impacts our Planet. Podcast with Robby Russell in the Maintainable Software Podcast.
– Sustainability: Key to Success. Blog post published by Agile Alliance
– Ethical Decisions in a Wicked World: the Role of Technologists, Entrepreneurs, and Organizations. By Claudia Melo published by infoQ.