Do You Know the Agile Manifesto?

The following post was published first on my blog, OurAgileJourney.com, 10/8/2020.

As we bring 2020 closer to an end we come closer to February 2021. "So what," you ask?

In February of 2001 seventeen people from the software development community gathered, and a few more were invited but couldn't make it. While some time was most certainly spent skiing and relaxing at the Snowbird ski resort in Utah there were also conversations about what the right alternative to the then-current standard heavyweight, document-driven software development process might be. Indeed, this meeting was a culmination of various other gatherings before it where various sub-groups had whittled away at this problem before it landed here.

If you consider yourself an agile practitioner, agilist, worker with an agile mindset, or any number of other titles related to the fields of lean and agile software development then this should mean something to you. Saying this meeting is why you have your job might be an exaggeration, but it is most certainly highly related to why your job looks the way it does.

Between now and February 2021 I am going to revive my "Back to the Basics" series and spend time going over the Agile Manifesto. This is something that I believe every team should spend time on, especially during team formation. I'll start today with the manifesto itself.

When the group got together to create this document success wasn't ensured. Some of the people involved were competitors with different methodologies. There was no company or single consultant looking to profit from the creation of this document. If anything it could make the playing field for their different approaches more level. I believe this apparent lack of a direct financial motivator was one of the reasons it succeeded and is still relevant to this day.

At the heart, I feel this Manifesto was really about people. To paraphrase Jim Highsmith, people stop being resources and start being people again. In the basics of what they agreed upon we can see a departure from the classic mindset of a business getting the most from its assets and a move to people providing the best value for those they serve. All of the projects and people management techniques born of the industrial revolution were failing the technology revolution. The Manifesto was just a concise way of stating it while providing a solution.

The Manifesto was not a call to abandon process and methodology. It was a call to reign in the crazy that had evolved from initial good intentions. The dichotomies were not set up as “either-or”, but as “both with preference to one.” It was also not meant as an end, but a beginning. The twelve principles were hammered out over the months following the initial meeting. The original seventeen people handed the whole thing over to a larger group of like-minded individuals in September which was followed by the formation of the Agile Alliance.

Today the Manifesto has a home both on the original site and the site of the Agile Alliance. The Agile Alliance now maintains the Manifesto and Principles. It does not do certifications or provide specific direction for training. Its mission is to "support those who explore and apply Agile principles and practices to make the software industry productive, humane, and sustainable." (https://www.agilealliance.org/the-alliance/)

See a brief history from one of the founders here: https://martinfowler.com/articles/agileStory.html