This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: Bliki: AgileSignatory
Feed Title: Martin Fowler's Bliki
Feed URL: http://martinfowler.com/feed.atom
Feed Description: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development
From time to time I get introduced as a "signatory of the Agile
Manifesto". Usually what they mean is that I'm an author of the
Manifesto for Agile Software Development, and thus one of its
initial signatories. But actually there are many more signatories
than the 17 authors, when I last looked the count was up to
10,104. If you're so inclined you may join that list.
After the Snowbird weekend Ward put up a web-site for the
manifesto, at that point he suggested
We've already been asked to accept more signatures. I'd be willing
to supervise (audit) the collection of names through the site. These could
become a third page of the site. I would probably collect them until we had
dozens or even hundreds of names.
Ward put the original manifesto page up in late Februrary, shortly
after the snowbird meeting, hosted on his own server - the same one
that ran the original wiki. It was at the URL agileAlliance.org,
which Ward later donated to the agile alliance using
agileManifesto.org for the manifesto. That original site just contained the
values, we worked on the principles over the next month or so. They
were finalized and published in April.
The facility for people to sign the manifesto was added in
Octoboer. Chet Hendrickson was the first to sign at Wed Oct 10 20:10:20 CDT
2001. Each signatory supplies a name, a URI, and a short
statement. Since it went live we've reached two orders of magnitude more
than Ward's early estimate. Ward still audits the signatures
himself with the help of some ruby/cgi code that Prag Dave whipped
up all those years ago.
In a recent fit of curiosity I asked Ward for some data on the
signatories. He did a bit of munging through his logs and I did some
more munging on the data he gave me. Here's a plot of the number of
signatories per month since the manifesto became signable
As you can see (you'll probably need to open the image to see it
properly) the manifesto had a definite increase in monthly signers
from 2004 to 2008. I think you get a better sense of this by looking at
the number of signatories per year.
The most recent activity on the manifesto has been its translation
currently coordinated by Henrik Kniberg. The first translation, to
Swedish, was published in February 2010. As I write this there are a
total of 22 languages done and another 15 in progress. Each
translation sparks a lively debate and discussion.
There's never been any particular push to add signatures. People
have just signed up as they have come across the web page. Part of me
doesn't want to change that with this post - but it's too interesting a
tidbit.
Previous Topic
