What Is Agile?
The Agile Manifesto was created in 2001. It was intended as a response to the heavyweight, documentation driven software development processes that were in common use at this time.
Software is a new industry. The first computers emerged after the 2nd World War. For decades following this, only a small number of computers were in use.
This changed in the 1980s & 1990s with the birth of the Personal Computer and the Internet. In the space of a few years, millions of people began creating software to help businesses gain competitive advantage and to provide new services for customers.
The volume of software in common use grew rapidly. A new industry was born. But this new industry lacked effective processes and the early years were marked by many problems.
In many organisations, people did not understand or were not able able to accept the complex nature of software product development. Irrational demands were often placed on people to complete a fixed scope of work to an unrealistic deadline. This prevented those involved from making often vital trade-off decisions early enough in the product development process to prevent delays and overruns.
It was common for projects to fail to deliver the outcomes that were originally intended. It was common for projects to deliver late, be over budget and have significant quality issues.
The industry was not in a good place. Low value, low-quality products and frustrated and disengaged people were commonplace. And the pattern repeated company after company, project after project, year after year.
This was the reality of the industry when I joined it in the 1990s. For many organisations who have not yet embraced better ways of working – it is still is the reality!
Traditional management practices are not easily replaced. Agility means embracing change and identifying and accepting certain risks. This is uncomfortable for people who may have spent decades using traditional management practices to limit change and lower risk.
So what is Agile & Agility? Well, let’s go back to that manifesto.
The values of the Agile Manifesto are:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
And while there may be value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. This is where the focus should be placed. You can find the Agile Manifesto as agilemanifesto.org
There are also 12 supporting principles which provide further supporting details. You can find the principles at agilemanifesto.org/principles
So, Agile is a set of values and principles. Like philosophy and as such it is widely open to interpretation. The term has been much misused since the creation of the manifesto.
The manifesto is a set of values & principles. People interpret the meaning of these values & principles through their own life experience, interests and biases. As a result, it means very different things to different people. When I ask 10 people what Agile is, I typically get 10 very different answers.
Despite all of this, taking an Agile approach is now the default way to develop software for the majority of organisations today.
At the same time, Scrum has emerged as the default way for those organisations to become more Agile. Scrum is the most widely used approach to become more Agile.
Scrum contains specific rules that used correctly, i.e. with the Agile values and principles in mind, can enable greater Agility. Scrum is not the only way to be Agile and Scrum does not in itself guarantee Agility.
For me, the best definition of Agile is that is about responding to change whilst managing risk. Those seeking to become Agile want to be able to embrace change and make it an advantage, whilst balancing the risk that this brings, in a way that is safe enough in their current environment.
So there is not a one size fits all way to be Agile. It depends on your desire for change and your tolerance for risk. A small startup will be naturally more Agile than a large hundred-year-old Bank.
Frameworks such as Scrum can help people find their own path to Agility.