Appreciating the importance of Agile's values and principles

No book that considers agile-based practices is complete without including a discussion on the Agile Manifesto and its impact on the software development industry. If you are interested in Scrum and agile-based software development practices, and you haven't done so already, you should read through the Agile Manifesto. It's available online at http://agilemanifesto.org/ [Kent Beck, et al. © 2001. Manifesto for Agile Software Development. http://agilemanifesto.org/. Accessed 10 November 2019]. For expediency, I refer situationally to specific values and principles throughout this book to show how a certain practice supports agile.

The main point I want to make in this section is that Agile was not and was never intended to be a methodology. The 17 signees of the Agile Manifesto represented at least 8 distinct software methodologies, by my counting, many of which are listed in the Moving away from the traditional model section in this chapter. Jim Highsmith, in his introduction, notes that Alistair Cockburn made the comment that he personally didn't expect that this particular group of agilities to ever agree on anything substantive.

The group of gathered software engineers wasn't going to agree on a specific agile methodology. But, in the end, they agreed on issues of far greater importance. As Highsmith put it, Agile Methodologies is about the mushy stuff of values and culture.

Agile is not about how to develop software; it is instead about implementing a culture that respects people and customers, promoting trust and collaboration, and creating organizations and cultures where people want to work. In the process, really good software is built quickly, efficiently, and with the features our customers want.