Scott Ambler was in town earlier this week to be a keynote speaker at the local BADD 2008 conference, and I was fortunate enough to attend a separate presentation on Thursday night at the West Des Moines Marriott, where Scott talked to around dozen of IT individuals about strategies for scaling agile development in real-world environments.

Overall, it was a great presentation. Scott has a reputation for speaking his mind about topics, and there was no shortage of that here. However, he is also known for making arguments based on factual material and he shared a number of research data with us around the adoption and success rates of agile (of which some of the data can be found here).

It definitely had a flavor of IBM Rational bias, but a lot of the messages were applicable beyond the scope of IBM and its RUP product to agile practices in general.

Overall, the message was clear: Agile is making (or has already made) its way into the mainstream, and it is going to be around for the long term.