Message from the Program Chairs

Agile 2007 is the premier international conference on Agile Software Development. Looking back on the conference series shows that the agile community has come a long way. The first Agile Conference in North America was called XP Universe 2001 and was held in Raleigh. At that time, about 230 people attended the conference. For the following years, this conference was renamed XP Agile Universe. Growing slowly, it moved to different locations in North America: Chicago (2002), New Orleans (2003, about 250 participants), and Calgary (2004, about 320 participants). In 2003, a second North American conference started. The Agile Development Conference was held in Salt Lake City in 2003 and 2004. In 2005, both conference series were merged into the Agile 20xx conference series. Agile 2005 was held in Denver, Agile 2006 in Minneapolis, and Agile 2007 is now in Washington, DC. At the same time, Agile methods were taking off in the software industry and participation was exploding. For Agile 2007, we are now expecting 1100+ participants????????? making it the largest international conference on agile approaches to software development. This year, the program of the conference covers a wide spectrum of topics and provides high-quality sessions for all levels of expertise on agile topics as well as many different job roles. Nearly 20 concurrent sessions ensure that at any time participants have many interesting presentations, hands-on sessions, tutorials, and workshops from which to choose. Agile 2007 will be an exciting conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management and development sides of agile software development. The program was selected in a peer-review process from hundreds of submissions from world leading experts on agile methodologies. It contains introductory tutorials, advanced interactive sessions, cutting-edge research, and reports about the latest experiences. It will allow anyone to learn someth- ng new about the application of agile methods to real world software development problems.