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The Agile Manifesto and Mindset

Do you know where Agile all began?  The manifesto behind one of the fastest growing project management and product development methodologies of the new millennium?

Check out the video and article below as we go through the Agile manifesto and mindset.

Where it all began.

In 2001 a group of individuals representing the most widely used lightweight software development methodologies agreed on a common set of values and principles which later became known as the Agile Manifesto.

The Agile Manifesto contains four statements of values, and this is where it all began. You’ll see that there’s many methodologies or many Agile practices that come out of Agile that you’ll learn about soon, but they all stem from these core principles and these core values that came about in 2001. The four Agile Values are:

We value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

So while processes and tools are important we value individuals and interactions more than processes and tools, and you’ll see that in the practices of agile where we have daily stand-ups and we’re really interacting to remove blockers on a daily basis rather than letting them simmer. So this is where we’re interacting and we’ve got the whole team approach where everyone who’s needed to be in a project is actually within that team – you don’t have to go externally or find them in other departments, they’re all within the one team. You can talk to them quite quickly and immediately. Next we prefer:

Working software over comprehensive documentation.

Instead of writing about it or doing more training or using excessive documentation, what we
prefer is just having working software, and releasing that working software on a regular basis using using the incremental approach. It’s something that the customer can see feel and touch so that they know, and we know, whether we’re all on the right track according to what they actually wanted. Next we prefer:

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

What that means is we’re actually responding to customer requirements and changing requirements as it goes along much more willingly and much easier, because we’re using iterations and increments where we can deliver something to or showcase or do a review, collaborating with the customer to make sure that what we’re delivering is what they want. We prefer that over
negotiating the contract so we don’t lock a customer in to something, for example “You must
do it this way” or “You must do it that way, we can only do it one way”. We’re actually happy to change and to evolve as the product is developed. We also want to:

Responding to change over following a plan.

That means your usual Waterfall approach, or your linear approach is where you have all of your
scope gathered upfront, so you get the customer requirements and then you develop something over a long period of time – it can be months or it can be years and then you deliver right at the end to the customer. And it’s only then that you find out whether they’re happy or sad with what they’ve actually received. However when we’re using the Agile approach we’re responding to
change and we’re getting the product into the customers hands early so that they can really check whether it’s what they wanted, and whether they described accurately what they wanted as well. We do that by iterating usually every two to four weeks and delivering something as an increment usually every two to four weeks so the customer can see for themselves whether everything is going as they had wanted.

So the Agile manifesto states that although the concepts on the right have value – certainly they’re valuable things – the concepts on the left have greater value when it comes to agile
delivery.

– By David McLachlan

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