In February of 2001, in Snowbird UT, a group of seventeen bright software developers got together to discuss software development methods that were lightweight and easy to implement. The term that they decided to use to describe these methods was “agile” and the 4 main postulates that they all agreed to became known as “Agile Manifesto“.
But just like anything in agile, continuous improvement and inspection & adaptation prevail. Therefore, while the four core values of original Agile Manifesto still represent a foundation, the Manifesto can be extended to other dimentions.
Here are some examples:
- Being Agile over “doing” Agile
- Servant Leadership over command & control
- Feature Teams over Component Teams
- Component Mentors over Component Owners
- T-shaped people over single specialty workers
- Monitoring Work in Progress (WIP) over managing workers
- Shorter Development Cycles over longer development cycles
- Automated Testing over manual testing
- Team Performance over individual performance
- Higher Base Salaries over subjective discretionary bonuses
- Continuous Improvement over “best practices”
- Real Agile Coaches over fake agile “experts”
- Funding Business Cycles over budgeting calendar years
- Dynamic Forecasting over “Dec-31st end-of-world” forecasting
- Team Collocation over geo-distribution and location “strategies”
- S.M.A.R.T. + E.R. (Ethical, Reasonable) goals over S.M.A.R.T. goals
- Scorecard Translation over scorecard cascading (top to bottom)
- Relying on what Counts over relying on what is easily countable