Agile Manifesto

Believe it or not, Agile has caused much controversy in the software community. There is still an ongoing battle between people who believe in the Waterfall model and those who want to "be Agile." But most of the controversy is due to a misunderstanding of what it means to be Agile. People with a low understanding of Agile will use it as an excuse for abandoning all process. "We don't need requirements," they say, "we're Agile!"

Nothing could be further from the truth. Agile does not mean abandoning process. It means that we do what makes sense. Some Agile methods are very rigid in the rules you have to follow (Scrum, for example). Being Agile means that we don't just blindly follow a process, not that we abandon it. Here's the exact wording of the manifesto:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

In other words, human interactions are more important than tools and processes, working software is more important than documentation, collaborating with customers is more important than following the letter of a contract, and sometimes we have to modify our plans in order to respond to a changing world. Personally, I don't see much to argue with there. Yet, the debate continues 20 years after the fact.

Truth be told, much of what is in the Agile Manifesto has now become standard practice in the software industry. Regardless of whether software organization says it's using Agile or not, collaborating with the customer, focusing on working software, and releasing often are pretty much the norm for everywhere now. It wasn't 20 years ago. It seems surprising that it would be necessary to call out these things that seem so obvious in a manifesto, but 20 years ago these concepts were not the norm. Having worked in a rigid Waterfall process, I can attest to the fact that customer collaboration, working software, and releasing often were not the norm where I worked in 2001.

Today, even organizations using Waterfall will work in an Agile way. Agile is a mindset, not a process. Any organization can be Agile, regardless of the process model being used.

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