Agile Software Development, Manifesto for
Origin
On February 11-13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people met to talk, ski, relax, and try to find common ground and of course, to eat. What emerged was the Agile Software Development Manifesto. Representatives from Extreme Programming, Scrum, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, and others sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes convened.
(Read the rest here: “History: The Agile Manifesto”)
Needs
From Jim Highsmith, in “History: The Agile Manifesto”…
In order to succeed in the new economy, to move aggressively into the era of e-business, e-commerce, and the web, companies have to rid themselves of their Dilbert manifestations of make-work and arcane policies.
While the Manifesto provides some specific ideas, there is a deeper theme that drives many, but not all, to be sure, members of the alliance. At the close of the two-day meeting, Bob Martin joked that he was about to make a “mushy” statement. But while tinged with humor, few disagreed with Bob’s [Robert Martin’s] sentiments that we all felt privileged to work with a group of people who held a set of compatible values, a set of values based on trust and respect for each other and promoting organizational models based on people, collaboration, and building the types of organizational communities in which we [the manifesto authors] would want to work. At the core, I [Jim Highsmith] believe Agile Methodologists are really about “mushy” stuff, about delivering good products to customers by operating in an environment that does more than talk about “people as our most important asset” but actually “acts” as if people were the most important, and lose the word “asset”. So in the final analysis, the meteoric rise of interest in and sometimes tremendous criticism of Agile Methodologies is about the mushy stuff of values and culture.
The Agile movement is not anti-methodology, in fact, many of us want to restore credibility to the word methodology. We want to restore a balance. We embrace modeling, but not in order to file some diagram in a dusty corporate repository. We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes. We plan, but recognize the limits of planning in a turbulent environment. Those who would brand proponents of XP or SCRUM or any of the other Agile Methodologies as “hackers” are ignorant of both the methodologies and the original definition of the term hacker.
(Read the rest here: History: The Agile Manifesto)
Values
Systemic Values
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development does not explicitly state any Values (by the Spine Model definition).
That said, they can be infered by looking at the principles with a Spine perspective. The first Principle states a preferences for valuing People higher than Process. The second Principle could be abstracted to valuing Outcomes over Output.
Personal Values
Robert Martin, from “History: The Agile Manifesto”…
We all felt privileged to work with a group of people who held a set of compatible values, a set of values based on trust and respect for each other and promoting organizational models based on people, collaboration, and building the types of organizational communities in which we would want to work.
Principles
Primary Principles
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Additional 12 Principles
| 1 | Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. |
| 2 | Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage. |
| 3 | Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. |
| 4 | Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. |
| 5 | Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. |
| 6 | The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. |
| 7 | Working software is the primary measure of progress. |
| 8 | Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. |
| 9 | Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. |
| 10 | Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential. |
| 11 | The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. |
| 12 | At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. |
(Source: agilemanifesto.org)
Practices
The manifesto does not prescribe or give opinions on any specific Practices.
Tools
The manifesto does not prescribe or give opinions on any specific Tools.