What is Agile Manifesto and its 12 Agile Principles?

Introduction to Agile Manifesto and Principles

In the early 1990s, software development was going through something called “the application development crisis.” People started to notice a significant lag in the delivery of new software development applications. It was taking them too long to deliver the projects, and often when the projects were delivered, they were already out of date. Much of this was a result of the existing waterfall approach to software development. As the name suggests, this approach depicts the features of a waterfall, which is top-down with no possibility of going back to the previous stage. The Agile Manifesto emerged as a response to these challenges, highlighting the need for a more iterative and flexible approach. Additionally, this approach had other drawbacks like:

1. Dependency: The work would start at one point and the next task could only be picked when the previous one was complete. This gated approach severely restricted feedback incorporation, collaboration, and flexibility
2. Long Software Development Cycle: Since all the features were delivered at once, it had a long delivery time, fixes were difficult to implement and integrate and the final product to be shipped to the customer took forever
3. Productivity: It was unproductive as one could not go backward to make any fixes and different teams were dependent on each other to start their work, e.g., the testing team cannot start their work until the “entire” code is developed, the development team cannot do fixes until the testing team tests the entire code base and so on
4. Flexibility: Changes were costly as the entire lifecycle had to be followed even for a small change, which resulted in pushback for changes even at the cost of customer satisfaction, quality, and usability of the product
5. Transparency: There needed to be more transparency as the level of customer involvement was limited, and work needed to be broken into smaller units. Teams relied on big upfront planning with little or no iteration, improvement, and incremental development
6. Lack of Innovation – There were a lot of management bottlenecks as there was no scope to pivot and everyone was sticking to the process. This led to a siloed working culture and a top-driven command and control-led work culture

All this resulted in unhappy customers, over-budgeting of projects, burned-out and unmotivated teams with a lot of work, long delivery cycles, and lack of innovation hence there was a need for a new way of developing software to address this crisis/situation.

Agile Manifesto was created to solve this unique scenario, a document outlining the core values and principles that should guide a flexible and iterative approach to software development and project management. This article talks about the Agile Manifesto, its history, significance, principles, and impact on modern business practices. We will attempt to answer the following pointers in this blog:

1. What is the Agile Manifesto?
2. How did the Agile Manifesto impact software development?
3. Is the Agile Development Manifesto still relevant?
4. Why is the Agile methodology manifesto important?
5. Is the Agile Development Manifesto and the Agile Project Management Manifesto the same?
6. What are agile manifesto and principles?
7. What are the 12 principles from the Agile Manifesto?
8. What are the 4 values from the Agile manifesto?

What is the Agile Manifesto?

In 2001, a group of 17 software practitioners met at a ski resort in Snowbird, Utah. All of them shared their frustration over the limitations of the traditional waterfall methodology and the hardships they faced while using the methodology. They came together to discuss and define a more flexible and responsive approach to software development.

Some of the prominent names among these practitioners include Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, and Jim Highsmith. These individuals come from diverse backgrounds and experiences within the software development industry, contributing to an all-round perspective on the challenges and opportunities in software development.

The traditional methodologies focused on documentation, meaning every requirement had to be well documented and planned in detail with all the possibilities planned upfront (well thought out and analyzed before the starting of projects) and then agreed upon by both the customer and development team. Once the document was agreed by both parties it would be the only source of truth and reference for the development team.

Since the development team worked in isolation and was hesitant to talk to the customer for clarification, there would be no scope for feedback from the customer. Almost no communication would happen between the customer and the development team regarding what was being developed. The communications or updates were restricted to the progress, in terms of the percentage of work completed and whether the project was trending to be delivered on time or not. Also, there was a lot of emphasis on the process to be followed and the tools to be used, which made the system more rigid. All these processes lead to bottlenecks and bureaucracy which reduces the ability to be flexible.

The Agile Manifesto is a document that draws on the core values and principles of the agile software development framework, focusing on an alternative to documentation-driven, gated software development processes with big upfront planning and a siloed working culture. The agile methodology manifesto emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, iterative and incremental development, and customer-centricity using closed, frequent feedback loops, which in turn creates a lightweight, more adaptive, and responsive approach to software development.

All this was based on four core values and twelve principles. Which we will discuss in detail in this blog. Let’s start with the four core values the Agile Manifesto emphasised on and try and understand the underlying reasons for adopting these four core values in the agile manifesto:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools: While processes and tools have their place, the Agile Manifesto prioritizes the value of skilled individuals and their ability to collaborate effectively and independently.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation: The manifesto emphasizes the importance of delivering working software early and often, allowing for continuous feedback from customers and iteration, rather than prioritizing exhaustive documentation, which may lose its significance over time due to changes in market requirement
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation: The manifesto advocates close collaboration with customers throughout the development process to ensure the final product aligns with their requirements. This replaces the focus on lengthy contract negotiations that often fail to capture evolving requirements
• Responding to change over following a plan: Traditional methodologies like waterfall, do not generally appreciate change and teams find themselves in an uncomfortable situation with any change request. The Agile Manifesto embraces change and the ability to adapt to changing requirements and market demands, prioritizing flexibility and responsiveness

These values highlight a shift from processes and documentation to people, collaboration, and adaptability. These core values are further supported by twelve guiding principles, which provide guidance on implementing agile, which we will discuss later in this blog.

Why is Agile Manifesto Important?

The Agile Manifesto holds immense importance for its impact on how we approach projects. It provides clear guidelines on how we can attain a system in project management and software development where teams shift their focus from a traditional top-down management approach to a more collaborative and team-oriented approach. It helps in creating teams that are responsive to change and focused on delivering value to customers. Since agile emphasizes more on individuals and interactions, it encourages open communication, trust, and accountability within the teams. This, in turn, removes rigidity, excessive documentation, and a lack of responsiveness to customer needs. In fact, it fosters a culture of open communication and transparency, leading to a more productive, motivated, and engaged workforce.

The far-reaching consequences of the Agile Development Manifesto extend beyond software development. Its core principles have been adopted by various industries, transforming how projects are managed. The focus on flexibility and responsiveness empowers teams in marketing, design, or HR to deliver results in a rapidly changing world.

These principles have wide applications, for example, a marketing team iteratively testing campaign elements with real-time customer feedback, or an HR professional adapting employee onboarding based on the new employee feedback.

Talking about the manifesto’s emphasis on collaboration has fostered a new work culture. Teams now prioritize open communication and transparency, breaking down silos and leading to a more engaged team member. This translates to increased innovation and problem-solving, as all team member’s perspectives are valued and encouraged.

The reach of the Agile Manifesto extends beyond process. It helps bring a change in the mindset of working professionals which empowers individuals and fosters a sense of ownership and accountability within teams. This not only improves the morale of the team but also leads to a higher quality of work and the ability to innovate and stay up to the market or even ahead of it in today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving world.

Agile Manifesto’s purpose

Before the Agile Manifesto, software development was often dominated by rigid methodologies and lengthy development cycles. Traditional methodologies relied on lengthy planning stages, heavy documentation, and one big bang release with all features delivered in one go. This approach struggled to adapt to changing needs and market demands, leading to frustration for both developers and customers.

The purpose of the Agile Development Manifesto is to provide a set of guiding principles that can help teams develop products that deliver more value and are aligned with the customer’s requirements. This helped in eradicating any ambiguity in terms of requirements and also keeping in account the evolving requirements both from customers and the changing market. Hence delivering projects with greater agility and efficiency.

This set of core principles revolutionized the industry and changed the way projects were executed, forever. These principles aimed to:

• Increase Project Agility: The agile manifesto equips development teams with the tools and mindset to navigate projects with greater flexibility. This means they can easily adapt to changing requirements, embrace new technologies, and prioritize delivery of value.
• Enhance Customer Satisfaction: Traditional methods often prioritize features over the needs of the end user. Agile principles place the customer at the center, and with continuous feedback and iterative development, ensures that the final product is aligned with actual user needs and delivers value early and often.
• Boost Productivity: Rigid processes and lengthy documentation cycles were a blocker for creativity and innovation. Collaboration fuels innovation, continuous improvement ensures ongoing relevance, and flexibility allows adaptation to the market’s needs leading to enhanced project outcomes and significantly faster time to market.
• Positively impact Team Morale: Agile principles promote collaboration and increase accountability, which empowers teams to make decisions, and celebrate progress. This fosters a more engaging and productive work environment with more satisfied team members.

Agile Manifesto and Principles

The Agile Manifesto isn’t a rigid set of rules, but rather a guiding philosophy. It outlines a set of core principles that teams can adapt to their specific needs and context. By picking up from these principles, teams can navigate complex projects with greater agility, efficiency, and customer focus. Let’s now delve deeper and explore the specific principles outlined in the Agile Development Manifesto.

The Agile Manifesto is built upon the below 12 key principles that promote the values of the Agile way of development. Below are these 12 principles from the Agile Manifesto:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

This principle emphasizes the importance of delivering working software frequently to ensure that customers receive value early and often. By focusing on continuous delivery, teams can gather feedback frequently and make improvements iteratively.

2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

“Life is not waiting for thunderstorms to pass, it’s learning how to dance in the rain.”

Agile processes leverage change to give the customer a competitive advantage. While traditional methodologies did not factor in scope change and often considered change as disruptive, this principle of agile emphasizes on embracing change as an opportunity to improve the final product. Agile methodologies provide flexibility and a cushion to incorporate evolving requirements due to market change or scope change from the customer. Moreover, giving the clients the right to modify, retouch, comment, and modify products, builds their confidence in the team.

3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Frequent delivery of working software allows teams to demonstrate progress, gather feedback, and make adjustments if needed. Shorter timescales help to ensure that development remains aligned with customer needs and faster time to market, giving businesses a competitive edge.

4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

To ensure that the final product meets the expectation of customer/user needs, agile methodologies promote collaboration between business and developers on a daily basis, breaking the silos between the 2 sets of teams. This constant communication not only helps the team to have a clear vision of what needs to be done but also helps to avoid unnecessary work and avoid mistakes early on.

5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

This principle highlights the importance of fostering a culture of trust and empowerment in the team. Motivated people have confidence in themselves and they tend to trust others often. They are focused. They dream of infinite possibilities and organize their lives by seeing the bigger picture. They are extremely satisfied with their life. By providing the right environment and support, teams can be more productive and can deliver higher-quality products.

6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Agile emphasizes the importance of clear and direct communication within the development team. Face-to-face conversations help foster better understanding, resolve issues quickly, and promote collaboration.

7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Rather than relying on extensive documentation, agile teams focus on delivering working software as the primary indicator of progress. By measuring the progress based on the working software that the team delivers, the team members have a sense of achievement and they know the effect of their contribution. This keeps the development teams focused on delivering real values.

8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

This principle emphasizes the importance of creating a sustainable work environment. An environment, which guarantees peace of mind to the teams so that they can focus on delivering value to the customer. Agile practices promote healthy work practices to avoid burnout and also promote work-life balance.

9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

This principle highlights the importance of technical expertise and good design practices within an agile approach. The development teams should be technically excellent – which means, they should pay attention to the details and focus on building things right, rather than gold-plating or sugar-coating the things they build.

10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.

Simplicity is the core principle of agile methodologies. By focusing on the essential tasks and avoiding unnecessary work, teams can deliver more value with more efficiency. Maximizing the amount of work not done means maximizing the amount of unnecessary work not done. Also, simplicity does not mean simplicity. To achieve simplicity, the teams try to polish and excel all the functionalities as much as possible to retain only the essentials and offer their client a functional environment.

11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

Agile teams should be self-organizing, meaning they should be able to make decisions on their own and take ownership of their work, which leads to better outcomes. These trams act faster, as they don’t need permission for every decision they make.

12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

This final Agile principle emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement. Agile methodologies encourage teams to regularly reflect on their processes, communication, and outcomes. Through introspection and collaboration, the team identifies areas for improvement and makes the necessary adjustments to enhance their effectiveness.

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As an agile innovation consulting organization, Benzne works closely with all the key stakeholders to understand the business outcomes, current state, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to design a business context-led transformation program team that aligns the best practices from various agile frameworks to the client business context and will lead to a long term, sustainable, scalable agile transformation.

Our Agile consultants provide guidance, training, coaching, and support to all the team members and most importantly create success stories to facilitate buy-in for the new ways of working across all levels to ensure successful Agile implementation and ongoing success. Check our detailed pages on agile transformation services to learn more about our methodology and unique approach.

Conclusion

The Agile Manifesto represents a foundational shift in project management and software development practices. By embracing the values and principles outlined in the manifesto, development teams can cultivate a culture of collaboration, adaptability, and innovation that drives project success. As businesses continue to evolve in a rapidly changing landscape, Agile methodology remains a powerful tool for managing complexity and delivering value to customers.

The Agile development manifesto holds its significance in every project today because of the customer-centricity and facilitation of change that comes with using Agile. Initially, it might have begun with the software industry taking up this framework seriously, but now many other industries have adopted and embraced the agile methodology.

We hope you found this blog insightful and useful. Please share your feedback and share it with relevant colleagues for maximum reach. Contact us at consult@benzne.com if you would like to know more about Benzne agile transformation services and how we can help you in your transformation journey.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are the 4 pillars of Agile?

The 4 pillars of Agile are the same as the 4 values described in the Agile manifesto. Which are:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change by following a plan

2. What are the 3 C’s in agile?

3 C’s in agile stand for:

• Card – A card or sticky note is used to give a physical manifestation of the user story. This helps to embed the requirements in the team’s heads as there is a physical representation, rather than a hypothetical idea.
  
• Conversation – This refers to the second stage of working with user stories: how to achieve the card’s requirement. Teams will discuss, ideate, and ask questions to develop a shared understanding of the situation and come up with potential solutions.
• Confirmation – The final C refers to the process of solidifying plans to move forward. The team will use decision-making frameworks to figure out the optimal solution, taken from the conversation stage, to solve the requirements from the Card stage.

3. What are KPIs in agile?

KPI, in agile, is defined as specific metrics that measure the below points at the end of every iteration or sprint:

1. Productivity of the teams
2. Progress in a particular time
3. Quality of work done
4. Performance of the teams
5. The well-being of the teams

Measuring these KPIs ensures continuous progress tracking. It also helps in making decisions regarding the team’s workload and gaining valuable insights into how the team is progressing and building future predictability. Below are some of the commonly used agile KPI metrics in agile:

1. Velocity: This metric measures how much work was completed by a team during a sprint.
2. Sprint Burndown Chart: A graph that highlights how much work is left to complete in a sprint.
3. Cumulative Flow Diagram: A diagram that helps teams visualize task distribution at various project stages and overall project progress.
4. Work item Age: Work Item Age (WIA) tracks the time a work item has spent in the software development cycle, from when it’s added to the backlog until it’s completed.
5. Cycle time: The amount of time an item stays in “in progress” until it is delivered.
6. Team happiness survey: A survey is done quarterly to understand the morale and satisfaction of the team members, how confident they feel to share their ideas and feedback, and how happy they are working in and as a team.

4. What is the cycle time in Agile?

The amount of time an item stays in the “active” or “in progress” stage is considered cycle time in Agile. i.e. from the time an item is picked by a team member until it is marked as “done”, is considered as cycle time. E.g if a ticket is picked for development on Monday and is completed or closed (including testing) on Thursday, in the same week, the cycle time for this item would be 4 days.

5. What is the Agile Manifesto in Scrum?

The Agile Manifesto is a guiding document that draws on the core values and principles of the agile software development framework. It consists of 12 principles and 4 values. People also refer to it as agile development manifesto, agile project management manifesto, or agile methodology manifesto, the original name is simply agile manifesto.