The founding event of the Agile movement. Seventeen practitioners met at the Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, February 11-13, 2001, and produced the agile-manifesto: four values, twelve principles, and the word "Agile" as a unifying term for the family of lightweight software development methodologies.
Context
By early 2001, multiple independent lightweight methodology traditions had developed in parallel and were beginning to recognize their family resemblance. The meeting was organized primarily by kent-beck and martin-fowler, building on the earlier rogue-river-lodge-2000 meeting. The agenda was ostensibly to discuss lightweight methods, but the ambition was higher: to find common ground across the different traditions.
The seventeen signatories and their traditions
The meeting brought together:
What happened
Over three days, the participants discussed their various approaches and sought common ground. The result was the agile-manifesto: a brief statement of four value trade-offs and twelve principles. The word "Agile" was selected after debate — other candidates included "lightweight" (rejected as dismissive), "adaptive" (already used by jim-highsmith's ASD), and others.
The meeting also established the agile-alliance as an organizing body.
Significance
The Snowbird meeting transformed seventeen separate traditions into a unified movement. The manifesto gave the movement a name, a shared identity, and a document that could be referenced, cited, and argued over. Within a decade, "Agile" had become the default description for modern software development practice in the industry.
The meeting has been described by participants as unusually harmonious — the presence of shared frustration with heavyweight methodologies created common ground. The brevity of the resulting document reflects a conscious effort to find text that all seventeen could sign.