The Agile 2003 conference in Salt Lake City was one of the early agile-alliance gatherings where mary-poppendieck and tom-poppendieck presented their lean software development framework to the broader Agile community. It represented the first major live engagement between the Poppendieck framework and the community for whom it was written.
Significance
Conference presentation at Agile 2003 mattered for reasons beyond dissemination. The Agile conference circuit was where the lean software framework encountered its most critical audience: practitioners already committed to XP, Scrum, or DSDM who would probe the Poppendieck claims against their own experience. That engagement was a testing ground.
The reception at early Agile conferences helped establish that lean software was being offered as complementary to rather than competitive with existing agile methods. The seven-lean-principles framework was compatible with XP's engineering practices and Scrum's iterative structure, which made adoption easier and reduced the defensive reactions that a more totalizing claim would have generated.
Role in the Trilogy
The Agile conference engagements during 2003–2009 were the primary feedback mechanism between the Poppendiecks' written work and practitioner reality. The questions, pushback, and use cases that emerged in these settings shaped the successive volumes: implementing-lean-software-development-2006 addressed the implementation questions that first-book readers brought to conference sessions, and leading-lean-software-development-2009 addressed the organizational and leadership gaps that practitioners identified when trying to apply the earlier frameworks in their organizations.