The 12 Principles of Agile software development embody the essential values of the Agile Manifesto. And if you thought it couldn’t get more essential than that, I’ve grouped them into four themes that shine a spotlight on the value that Agile brings to teams, software projects, customers and organisations wherever it’s successfully used!
Watch this episode of #WhyShaiWhy or keep reading to discover the four Agile themes. If you want copies of the posters mentioned in the video, just let us know!
What makes Agile valuable
I believe these themes distill the fundamental value Agile brings to teams, software projects and organisations. They’re all equally important, even if the 12 Principles of Agile aren’t shared equally between them!
Customer and Software
We can’t do without these two in an Agile team. We are not about technology; we are not about hardware, or anything technical.
It’s about software and relationships with your customers.
Collaboration and Team
Especially in corporate environments, you have multiple stakeholders relying on your development team. Get collaborating with them and give them full access to your team when and if they need it. Build engagement throughout your stakeholder base to make your software development efforts as easy and streamlined as possible.
But communication should not only be external to your team. You need to invest in your own team’s collaboration. That might mean having team-o’clock or two-pizza teams. It also means ensuring team members can undertake each other’s roles at a basic competency level.
Closed Loop Learning
The iterative way in which Agile works is all about learning. Think about it this way: if Sprint 1 is an experiment, then Sprint 2 encompasses the learnings from Sprint 1. Sprint 3 would encompass the learning from sprint 1 and 2.
Closed loop learning will make you very good, very fast!
(And that makes you, your team and your boss look good, too.)
Love Change!
Change is the way of the world. Things don’t stagnate purely because it is not in the nature of humanity.
Agile teams will embrace change and in most cases even promote change throughout the team and organisation. Without change we get no where – so let’s get somewhere today.