Let’s take a journey through time back to 2001. IT had a dirty little secret, and it finally got acknowledged!
Let’s step back. In the late 90’s we had a HUGE problem. What was it?
Software development projects failed more often than not. More than 50% of projects failed.
So a bunch of consultants got together and came up with an ‘umbrella’ concept called The Agile Manifesto.
Individuals and interactions over process and tools. This seems a little counter-intuitive but when you really stop to think about it – people and relationships are much more important when it comes to software development, than processes or technology (tools). It’s because people use software. And learning is done via interactions.
Working software and comprehensive documentation. The problem with having comprehensive documentation is that it makes things very static and change-less. But the real world changes all the time so all of a sudden we were not meeting the needs of our users by only delivering what they asked for at the start of the project. Instead, in Agile we use the only real indicator of progress, working software.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Let’s face it – most of us IT geeks don’t love to over communicate. But Agile changes this. Without collaboration we make bad assumptions, we have bad communication, and we silo ourselves and don’t learn from the talent around us. So let’s make communication and collaboration easier so that we can make our software useful, novel – right?
Responding to change over following a plan. Remember the days of “change request process” or “requirements creep“? Wow – we spent more time documenting these changes than actually working on them. Now under an Agile world, change is built into the process – it’s trivial. Change is welcomed, change is promoted, change is craved.
One thought on “The Agile Manifesto”