Post-agile software development

Peter Hilton

Last week, I attended and presented at Agile Cambridge 2025, an excellent conference where agile practitioners in various roles mix for two days. In the days since the conference, I have reflected on the modern agile software development topics the conference covered.

Two conference topics stood out. First, many presenters mentioned XP (Extreme Programming), which continues to inspire current practices, despite its age. By comparison, lean software development, Scrum and Kanban have lost mindshare.

Second, most of the conference programme’s topics don’t sound like they belong to the agile software development of twenty years ago. Modern software development practices now span a broader scope, as recognise the impact of adjacent topics, and our ability to work on them.

Psychological safety

In the closing keynote, We still don’t have psychological safety, Gitte Klitgaard reviewed growing awareness for how psychological safety determines team performance. Meanwhile, most teams still don’t have it.

From now on, I would find it strange for any software development conference not to include this topic. After all, as my own extreme product development presentation concluded, modern software development practices, agile and otherwise, depend on psychological safety.

Sustainability

In Get your fingers on the digital product sustainability pulse: research and recommendations, Joanna Masraff reported results from the Digital Product Sustainability Pulse Report. She encouraged product people can take a broad view of digital product sustainability, and to recognise our opportunities to improve sustainability.

Leadership

In Calm REBEL: leading without losing yourself, Geoff Watts told a story that introduced the core ideas from his Calm Rebel Leadership book. As product people, we identify with the difficulty of ‘leading without losing yourself’, as he put it, and recognise his description of the traps that dilute, weaken, and ultimately destroy our leadership. While leadership didn’t feel like an agile software development topic in the years following the agile manifesto, it does now.

Continuous integration

I only attended one session with a trad-agile topic: Thierry de Pauw’s Non-blocking continuous code reviews case study. Of Extreme Programming’s many practices, continuous integration remains elusive. In practice, a whole generation of software developers have only ever used pull requests with blocking code reviews. Some teams have successfully applied Extreme Programming’s integrate often rule, but never the majority.

Zero-bug policy

My own case study about Zero-bug policy success, presented another old topic: software quality. This too appears in the original Extreme Programming rules, namely as the combination of two testing practices:

1. ‘All code must pass all unit tests before it can be released.’
2. ‘When a bug is found tests are created.’

It seems that modern software development doesn’t talk about ‘agile’ practices any more, and that its scope grows as we discover ‘better ways of developing software’. But at the same time, our industry still hasn’t mastered Extreme Programming, and can still benefit from further establishing its practices.

📌 As of October 2025, Peter Hilton is available for a new senior product management role (Europe remote, or Rotterdam), and speaking engagements.