Agile Principles and Values For Development

Agile Principles and Values For Development

Agile development is a term that was derived from the Agile Manifesto, which was written in 2001 by a group that included the creators of Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), and Crystal; a representative of feature-driven development; and several other thought leaders in the software industry. The Agile Manifesto established a common set of overarching values and principles for all of the individual agile methodologies at the time. It details four core values for enabling high-performing teams.

• Individuals and their interactions
  
• Delivering working software
  
• Customer collaboration
  
• Responding to change

These core values are supported by 12 principles, which you can find at the following Web site: Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
These values are not just something the creators of the Agile Manifesto intended to give lip service to and then forget. They are working values. Each individual agile methodology approaches these values in a slightly different way, but all of these methodologies have specific processes and practices that foster one or more of these values.

Individuals and Interactions

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Individuals and interactions are essential to high-performing teams. Studies of "communication saturation" during one project showed that, when no communication problems exist, teams can perform 50 times better than the industry average. To facilitate communication, agile methods rely on frequent inspect-and-adapt cycles. These cycles can range from every few minutes with pair programming, to every few hours with continuous integration, to every day with a daily standup meeting, to every iteration with a review and retrospective.
Just increasing the frequency of feedback and communication, however, is not enough to eliminate communication problems. These inspect-and-adapt cycles work well only when team members exhibit several key behaviors:

• respect for the worth of every person
  
• truth in every communication
  
• transparency of all data, actions, and decisions
  
• trust that each person will support the team
  
• commitment to the team and to the team’s goals

To foster these types of behavior, agile management must provide a supportive environment, team coaches must facilitate their inclusion, and team members must exhibit them. Only then can teams achieve their full potential.
Moving toward these types of behavior is more difficult than it might appear. Most teams avoid truth, transparency, and trust because of cultural norms or past negative experiences from conflict that was generated by honest communications. To combat these tendencies, leadership and team members must facilitate positive conflict. Doing so not only helps create productive behavior but also has several other benefits:

• Process improvement depends on the team to generate a list of impediments or problems in the organization, to face them squarely, and then to systematically eliminate them in priority order.
  
• Innovation occurs only with the free interchange of conflicting ideas, a phenomenon that was studied and documented by Takeuchi and Nonaka, the godfathers of Scrum.
  
• Aligning the team toward a common goal requires the team to surface and resolve conflicting agendas.
  
• Commitment to work together happens only when people agree on common goals and then struggle to improve both personally and as a team.

This last bullet, about commitment, is especially important. It is only when individuals and teams are committed that they feel accountable for delivering high value, which is the bottom line for software development teams. Agile methodologies facilitate commitment by encouraging teams to pull from a prioritized work list, manage their own work, and focus on improving their work practices. This practice is the basis of self-organization, which is the driving force for achieving results in an agile team.
To create high-performing teams, agile methodologies value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Practically speaking, all of the agile methodologies seek to increase communication and collaboration through frequent inspect-and-adapt cycles. However, these cycles work only when agile leaders encourage the positive conflict that is needed to build a solid foundation of truth, transparency, trust, respect, and commitment on their agile teams.

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