The Agile Alliance is the nonprofit organization founded in late 2001 by the signatories of the agile-manifesto to further the adoption and development of Agile principles. Its founding followed directly from the snowbird-meeting-2001, channeling the energy of that convergence into an institutional form. jim-highsmith served as the organization's first chairman.
Founding and Mission
The Agile Alliance was established in the months following the Snowbird meeting as a membership organization dedicated to promoting the concepts outlined in the agile-manifesto. The founding brought together the authors and practitioners who had signed the manifesto — including kent-beck, alistair-cockburn, ward-cunningham, martin-fowler, ken-schwaber, jeff-sutherland, dave-thomas, and the other signatories — into a formal body with ongoing organizational purpose.
Its stated mission is to further the principles of Agile software development and to help practitioners apply those principles effectively. This encompasses education, community building, research facilitation, and the annual conference that became its most visible activity.
The Agile 20XX Conference
The Alliance's most significant ongoing contribution is the Agile 20XX conference series, held annually. The first Agile conference was organized in 2003 in Salt Lake City, Utah — the first-agile-conference-2003. This conference became the central gathering point for the Agile community, distinct from the older XP and Scrum conferences that preceded it, and one of the largest practitioner-focused software development events in the world.
The conference structure reflects the Alliance's inclusive approach to the Agile ecosystem: it does not privilege any single framework (Scrum, XP, Kanban, SAFe) but creates space for practitioners across the full range of Agile methods.
Relationship to the Broader Ecosystem
The Agile Alliance occupies a different position in the Agile ecosystem than the certification bodies that followed. Unlike the scrum-alliance or scrum-org, the Alliance does not issue certifications; it functions as a professional community and convener. This has kept it closer to the original intellectual intent of the agile-manifesto — a set of shared values and principles rather than a commercial framework — while also limiting its direct influence on practitioner behavior compared to organizations that control certification.
The Alliance's existence through the snowbird-and-early-adoption, scrum-dominance-and-mainstream, enterprise-scaling-era, and post-agile-era periods means it has witnessed and responded to all the major tensions in the movement's development: the rise of Scrum as dominant framework, the emergence of scaling frameworks, and the post-Agile critiques.
Intellectual Role
The Alliance has published research, maintained the "Agile Subway Map" of interconnected practices, and through its conference provided a platform for both foundational figures and critics. During the post-agile-era, when voices like alistair-cockburn (Heart of Agile) and joshua-kerievsky (Modern Agile) challenged the movement's direction, the Alliance's conference remained a forum for that discourse.