Agile Manifesto Quotes

Agile Manifesto.” It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology.

This principle fits well with the concept of business and development working daily. Business needs to be intensely involved with the process, if for nothing more than identifying the 80% of the work that we really don’t have to do. Just think of the amount of money that could be saved every year by reducing project scope to only those features and functions that are actually used! Think of how quickly we could deliver functionality! Think of how many more “projects” we could complete!

We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.

believe that this is simpler than it sounds. It is about identifying the obstacles in our way and taking today’s best-practice ideas—those found in the Agile Manifesto and in books like Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and others on today’s management bookshelves—and applying them to IT leadership.

In the previous two decades, as NUMMI’s success had become better known, executives in other industries had started adapting the Toyota Production System philosophy to other industries. In 2001, a group of computer programmers had gathered at a ski lodge in Utah to write a set of principles, called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” that adapted Toyota’s methods and lean manufacturing to how software was created.

que diecisiete líderes de desarrollo de software escribimos lo que hoy se conoce como el Agile Manifesto. En ese documento proclamamos estos valores: personas antes que procesos, productos que funcionen antes que documentar lo que se supone que deben hacer, colaborar

One of the primary reasons the Agile Manifesto was crafted was to address the need to respond to change. The

The value of breaking big opportunities into a series of smaller opportunities is twofold. First, it allows us to tackle problems that otherwise might seem unsolvable. And second, it allows us to deliver value over time. That second benefit is at the heart of the Agile manifesto and is a key tenet of continuous improvement.

Life is hard in the days, but in the decades, the creator surges ahead from connecting the dots. Three decades of research by Korn Ferry7 shows that learning agility is the single-best predictor of career success, not grades or college pedigrees.

Learning-agile employees constantly seek new challenges at work, take risks and self-reflect from mistakes. They’re obsessed with learning and growth rather than titles and promotions. As a result, they adapt quickly to unfamiliar situations and thrive among chaos and uncertainty, the number one most critical skill in a world changing dramatically from technology. The higher you go in an organization, the more you’ll lead and make decisions in uncertainty. While ordinary careers stutter and plateau in this uncertainty, the learner’s career accelerates. Figure 6.1: The learner’s career path

Today’s worker wants a sense of purpose. In fact, most demand a sense of purpose in the work that they do. The desire for a sense of purpose extends well beyond titles. The desire for a sense of purpose is a fundamental human need. Who among us does not desire a sense of purpose and a reason for being and a reason for doing? Is that desire for purpose and for meaning any different in the soul of the front-line worker or the individual contributor, than it is in the leader?

If you want to deliver early, you have to change how you’re doing what you’re doing. And you can only change how you work by introducing risk and instability into the system. You must destabilize the system to change the system. But when you destabilize the system, you risk failure.

You as the leader need a robust process around how you examine failure in your system. Do you punish people who failed? How do you get the system to be better at identifying and correcting failures earlier? My premise is that you can’t lead by trying to minimize risk because if you do, you’ll also minimize productivity and creativity.

If I have to motivate you, I’m spending too much leadership time and leadership energy on the raw materials. Each employee needs to bring the raw materials: the energy, the enthusiasm, the professionalism, the drive. The leader creates an environment where people can do great work in service of something bigger than themselves. This environment includes projects that are meaningful and valuable. The leader brings the work to the right people.

Give them the environment they need.” What does “environment” mean? Alex King describes an aspect of an environment that attracts and retains talent. He encourages leaders to ensure that the team has a clear long-term goal for what outcome they want to achieve. Not necessarily the specific product, but a good pulse on what problem they are solving. Having at stable 6-month or 1-year roadmap greatly benefits your team.

Meaningful work has social value. The software development that enables meaningful work is by extension meaningful work in and of itself.

You might be thinking, “Well, it’s the leader’s job to motivate her employees.” I disagree. The leader’s job is not to cause a person to feel ownership and pride and energy and drive; that is up to the individual. The leader’s job is to provide meaningful work in a generative environment. It’s to provide meaningful work that inspires motivated people. Make the environment generative.

Everyone on your team needs to see that they are part of something bigger than themselves. And one rule about smart people: Smart people want to work with smart people.

How do you inspire people: give them meaningful work, show you trust them, empower them, and create opportunities for them to do their best work, and create opportunities for them to realize and achieve their potential.

A key differentiator between good leaders and the best leaders is this: good leaders support their teams, where the best leaders develop their teams.

Demonstrating that you care can be done by demonstrating empathy. And empathy doesn’t require that we pry, only that we listen attentively.

The best leaders think broadly and act directly. The best leaders articulate a clear and compelling vision. The best leaders model the ethics and the values and the behaviors that the company stands for. “As the leadership goes in this regard, so goes the health of the company” (Interview with Mike Irizarry, 12/19/22). The best leaders deliver.

It may go without saying, but I will say it anyway: the way leaders get things done is through other people. The best leaders “are being able to separate a process that’s not leading anywhere from process that is leading somewhere” (Interview with Doug Lowell, 7/21/22). Busy-ness isn’t the measure; valuable results are the measure.

You as the leader need to be aware of the communication that isn’t happening. You as the leader need to be aware of the communication that perhaps you take for granted when you and your team are in an office environment, where the teams can walk down the hall, have that quick conversation, and be connected. You as the leader need to be deliberate in your communication so that you can fill in the gaps where important information might be missing.

What does this Principle mean? Here’s a way to think about this: “We care most about the customer. We care most about satisfying the customer. We know what satisfies the customer because we listen to the customer.

Change the question that you ask your customer from, “What would you like?” to “What matters most?” Then break the work, the project, the program, into small discrete chunks that can be described clearly.

Despite all this pressure—and the pressure is real, no question about that—in the face of all this pressure, look back to the Principle and distill it to this: Your highest priority is delivering value. If you’ve hit the schedule but failed to satisfy your customer, or if you’ve come in under budget but failed to satisfy your customer, or kept your team intact and focused and committed but failed to satisfy your customer, ask yourself, what have you accomplished? As Mike shared with me, for Principle 1, the focus is on value. “The ‘v’ in MVP is ‘Value.’ And this ‘V’ often gets lost as pressures to deliver increase.

Invest in deeply understanding the customer problem. When the customer says, ‘I want ‘X’, ‘X’ may not actually be the solution. Dig in further to understand what attributes of ‘X’ are appealing to your customer. The best solution may actually be ‘Y’, that happens to do some things like ‘X’. Get a clear understanding of your customer needs and ensure that your team is fully aware of what problem you are trying to solve. And encourage, even require, that your team verify their assumptions with their customer throughout the development lifecycle.

owner. Give them a big enough stake in the outcome that they feel like they own their piece of this and not that they’re a cog in a machine.” Without the reward of the stake in the owner’s outcome, then it’s lip service. What you do is up to you. But choose something. Instill an owner’s mindset.

People who need daily motivating, daily pep talks, will drain your energy and will distract you from the work of the leader. People who aspire to do great work, people who are inspired by the opportunity to contribute, to make a difference, to work with like-minded colleagues, these are the people who are more likely to bring their best selves to their work.

The best leaders think broadly and act directly.

The best leaders consider the dynamic of the company, of the industry, of the customer, of the broader environment and of the immediate environment, including social and cultural dynamics, and then they act. A leader understands the dynamic of the business, the importance of the objective, and the role of the team well enough to determine the next best actions.

Leaders act. The best leaders bring people together, and they engage with them. These leaders work to establish an organizational routine of connecting with customers, their peers, and their teams. They engage resources and connect them—see Leadership is conjunctive above—and they enable new and unexpected or unanticipated or even unimagined outcomes.

One way that the best leaders make interpretations of complex or ambiguous situations understandable for their teams is metaphors. The best leaders develop metaphorical thinking and recognize the value of metaphors. Metaphorical descriptions can provide employees with new perspectives and nuanced points of view that in turn aid in their thinking and their understanding.

The world we live in and the world we work in changes rapidly and changes at scale. It demands more than one thinker. It demands more than one voice. It demands inclusive dialogue. Rapidly changing situations—globally, socially, competitively— “require people to act independently far more often, rather than waiting for direction from above.

Provide meaningful work. You as the leader of your team must be able to articulate the higher purpose for the team’s work. Provide an environment where the work is meaningful—intentionally and explicitly connected to a higher cause—and where the individual’s connection to meaningful work is made explicit.

What about stretch objectives? If you believe that your role as the leader is to set an unrealistic goal, your team will feel defeated from the outset. But what if you could get your team approaching problem-solving differently? Pose the challenge, share the compelling ‘why,’ and see what they can do. Help get your team to the point where, when they’re confronted with a particularly daunting challenge, they say, ‘That sounds impossible. It sounds like it can’t be done. But if it could be done, what would it look like? How could we solve this, even partially?

Create a safe space for your team. You can talk about psychological safety all day. But there’s nothing more powerful, nothing more convincing, than demonstrating that you’ve created a safe space. One way to do this: admit your own mistakes and share the impacts of your mistakes and the outcomes from your mistakes. Did the product fail? Did you learn from what happened? Share honestly and openly. Your examples speak loudly. They reveal not only your humility, but they also set the example for your team. They too will make mistakes, like you have. They too will be concerned or worried or scared, like you were. Set the example that mistakes happen—you make them, they make them—and that as a team, you discuss them, learn from them, and you move on together.

Let’s consider changing the word “motivated” to “inspired.” Here’s why: if your challenge as the leader is to motivate people, I would argue that you’ve got the wrong people. People who need daily motivating require a cheerleader; your role as the leader is not to lead cheers. Your role is to create an environment where each individual can do great work in service of something bigger than themselves. Creating such an environment requires that you as the leader have and can articulate a compelling vision of the future and a compelling vision of the value of the work that you’re asking your team to do. Creating such an environment requires that you as the leader can articulate the value that each person on the team brings to that team. Creating such an environment requires that you as the leader understand what “value” means to each person on your team, how they define it, how they view it, where they see it, and where they don’t see it. You as the leader need to know, and enable, each person on your team to connect themselves to the value of the work in front of them. That’s inspirational leadership.

In these forums, not only are you sharing information and listening, but you are also teaching. This is an opportunity for you to share stories. Share the company’s story. Share your story. You are the leader, and you have stories about your career, about your development, about leaders you’ve had. You have stories about what you’ve learned and how you’ve learned. Stories are one of the most powerful ways to connect that human beings connect. Share your story.

Understanding the requirements, and as importantly, understanding the value of the requirements, helps the developers prioritize each requirement against every other requirement.

When people are connected to others through a shared purpose for the success of an organization, they often become capable of doing more than initially envisioned (Kotter, 2012).

You are the leader. What do you do? You have daily standups. Who do you include? You include your developers, your product owner, and your business owner. Why do you have daily standups? What’s your objective? What’s your intended outcome? It’s this: you connect so that you can gain insight, achieve clarity, achieve alignment, establish priorities, and make meaningful progress.

As you seek to understand, you must also seek to be understood. Seeking to understand requires empathy; seeking to be understood requires patience and humility. It doesn’t mean that you repeat yourself again and again, or that you get louder and louder. It means that you find ways to connect. You seek to understand how your colleague learns, how they listen, how they express themselves, and what they respond to. This is the basis of connection and a basis of communication.

the development teams learn the product or the feature from the business owner’s point of view. They use the features. They understand more than what the feature does; they understand how the feature is intended to be integrated into the product. They understand the role of the feature in the intended customer experience. With this insight, the development team can make recommendations that simplify the experience and enable even more efficient future development. And with the trust that has been established, and with the credibility that the development team has earned by learning the experience of the product, they can challenge the requirements. They can make suggestions and recommendations from the customer perspective, not exclusively from a developer’s perspective. They immerse in the product to learn the experience of the product.

One of Amazon’s leadership principles applies here: Disagree, then commit. The notion of disagreeing, and then committing, can be a pragmatic approach for causing an honest dialogue because with this notion, you are explicitly stating the expectation that there will be disagreement.

People who feel empowered feel trusted. People who feel trusted feel empowered. And people who are trusted and empowered will make things happen.

Motivated individuals are key to success. You as the leader motivate and inspire individuals from the day they join your team to the day they leave. You motivate and inspire the people on your team by teaching, sharing, empowering, challenging, trusting, holding accountable, rewarding, and developing.

By establishing this condition—that people in the room will and are expected to disagree—you as the leader are establishing a condition that will foster growth. The views of each person are acknowledged. The person who disagrees isn’t bullied into changing his or her mind. He isn’t forced to capitulate. She isn’t required to agree.

For an organization to seek stable equilibrium relationships with an environment which is itself inherently unpredictable is bound to lead to failure. The organizations will build on its strengths, fine-tune its adjustments—and succumb to more innovative rivals. In this environment, successful strategies, especially in the longer-term, do not result from managing an organizational intention and mobilizing around it; instead, they emerge from leading complex and continuing interactions between people” (Schneider et al., 2017; Rosenhead et al., 2019).

Because the time spent finding and fixing code that wasn’t created using TDD was greater than if they had slowed down and done the initial coding properly, trying to write code faster by neglecting technical excellence was actually slower in the long run.

The first Agile principle is that our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. This provides the grounding teams need as they pursue the Agile path.

The phrase “valuable software” reminds us to always be vigilant that we are actually concentrating our efforts on the most valuable stories, those that will give the most return on our investment.

The real benefits of agile lies in greater transparency, predictability and faster time to market.

In software development the primary measure of progress has to be working software that meets the needs of the end users.

real humans do not like being micro-managed and the majority of workers are motivated more by intrinsic factors than extrinsic rewards.

Managers must be true servant leaders (and the scrum framework calls this out in the position of scrum master as servant leader) for their people. The front line workers are not there to serve their managers. It is up to management to create an environment that allows workers to do their work.            

We are big fans of the agile software movement. In 2001, seventeen software developers met in Snowbird, Utah, and published the “Manifesto for Agile Software.” The four main values in the manifesto remind us how the best friction fixers think and act: (1) “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”; (2) “working software over comprehensive documentation”; (3) “customer collaboration over contract negotiation”; and (4) “responding to change over following a plan.” Agile software teams deliver their work in small increments rather than in one “big bang” launch. Rather than following a rigid plan, they constantly evaluate results and constraints and update the software, and how they work, along the way.

Failure needs to be contextualized. It needs to be understood and accepted as part of the process. Too often failure is defined as something that either does or doesn’t happen until the end. Leaders need to communicate that failure is part of the process and that it’s expected. And then when they see failures, and they inevitably will, they need to talk about it. They need to tell stories about failures. They need to demonstrate through their actions and their narratives that failures are expected and are as much a part of the process as anything else. And that when the team fails, they adjust. And that this is exactly what we all should be doing. Our goal is to generate that failure as early as possible so we can get to the next iteration. That’s considered part of the process.

Sutherland and a group of top software development gurus met for three days in 2001 to find an alternative. They hammered out a one-page document called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,

The problem stated by the Agile Manifesto authors is the reliance on pre-planning around incorrect assumptions, and the lack of coordination between business owners and developers. By fixing those two core problems, Agile Software Development aims to make the act of building software more agile.

When figures identified as thought leaders suggest the real value of higher education rests in its ability to teach new skills to the rising generation (as well as current job seekers who’ve been left behind, outsourced, or downsized), they cast knowledge and knowledge creation in purely instrumental terms, rendering the work of higher education almost completely transactional in nature. Sure, there are platitudes about “deep learning” and “meaningful connections” thrown into the mix, but that instrumental logic remains the dominant trope. This creates a real problem for those of us engaged in articulating and defending the larger value— the intrinsic public good— of higher education. Challenged by the abstract nature of arguments about social contracts and civic connections, we shift to a language we think will be taken more seriously by administrators, politicians, and cost-conscious parents: the language of marketable skills for the “new economy” and of terms like “nimble” and “agile” and “multiple competencies.” But in doing this, we cede the terrain of the debate; we’ve implicitly declared higher education’s real value is transactional and market oriented when we use that language. We’ve sacrificed our larger vision in favor of short-term relevance. While it might be an eminently understandable move, it’s certainly a dangerous one.

The Lean-Agile mindset is the combination of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and actions of leaders and practitioners who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto and Lean thinking and apply it in their daily lives.

To begin the Lean-Agile journey and instill new habits into the culture, everyone must adopt the values, mindset, and principles provided by SAFe, Lean thinking, and the Agile Manifesto. This new mindset creates the foundation needed for a successful Lean-Agile transformation.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was put together by a group of developers at a ski resort in Utah in 2001. It contains four simple but powerful value comparisons: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. You can apply these principles to any kind of subscription service. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s the result of iterating a concept over a period of time. Big “boom or bust” product launches can actually be a recipe for burnout: they result in unhealthy peaks and troughs of productivity and inspiration. The idea is to create an environment that supports sustainable development—the team should be able to maintain a constant pace of innovation indefinitely. That’s the only way to stay responsive, to stay agile.

Agile HR Manifesto We are uncovering better ways of developing an engaging workplace culture by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work, we have come to value: Collaborative networks over hierarchical structures Transparency over secrecy Adaptability over prescriptiveness Inspiration and engagement over management and retention Intrinsic motivation over extrinsic rewards Ambition over obligation That is, while there is value in the items on the right section of the sentence, we value the items on the left more.

In recent years, Eric Ries famously adapted Lean to solve the wicked problem of software startups: what if we build something nobody wants?[ 41] He advocates use of a minimum viable product (“ MVP”) as the hub of a Build-Measure-Learn loop that allows for the least expensive experiment. By selling an early version of a product or feature, we can get feedback from customers, not just about how it’s designed, but about what the market actually wants. Lean helps us find the goal. Figure 1-7. The Lean Model. Agile is a similar mindset that arose in response to frustration with the waterfall model in software development. Agilistas argue that while Big Design Up Front may be required in the contexts of manufacturing and construction where it’s costly if not impossible to make changes during or after execution, it makes no sense for software. Since requirements often change and code can be edited, the Agile Manifesto endorses flexibility. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan.

aim is to make the delivery of software from the hands of developers into production a reliable, predictable, visible, and largely automated process with well-understood, quantifiable risks. Using the approach that we describe in this book, it is possible to go from having an idea to delivering working code that implements it into production in a matter of minutes or hours, while at the same time improving the quality of the software thus delivered. The vast majority of the cost associated with delivering successful software is incurred after the first release. This is the cost of support, maintenance, adding new features, and fixing defects. This is especially true of software delivered via iterative processes, where the first release contains the minimum amount of functionality providing value to the customer. Hence the title of this book, Continuous Delivery, which is taken from the first principle of the Agile Manifesto: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software