XPA gile Universe 2003 is the third conference in a series running in North A- rica and attracting participants from all over the world who are interested in the research, development and application of agile software processes. Agile app- aches value people and interaction over processes and tools – moving software engineering from the process-oriented software development approaches of the 1990s towards people-oriented approaches that we are starting to see more and more in this decade. Agile approaches stress a holistic view of software deve- pers as being involved in analysis, design, implementation and testing activities, while more traditional, tayloristic approaches separate these tasks and assign them to different “resources. ” Tayloristic approaches create knowledge-sharing problems as information gathered by one person needs to be handed over – usually in the form of documentation – to the next person in the chain. Agile approaches reduce the number of hand-offs and, thus, decrease the amount of required documentation for knowledge sharing. While deemed a novelty only a few years ago, agile methods are now be- ming established in the software industry and are being applied in more and more application domains. While agile approaches move into the mainstream of software organizations, we are only now beginning to understand their benefits, areas of applicability, and also their dangers. This year’s conference will increase this understanding and provide a better base for industry practitioners as they assess the effectiveness of agile methods in their environment.