Agile software development values
Based on their combined experience of developing software and helping others do that, the authors of the manifesto declared that they valued:
- 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 to say, while both sides have value and the items on the right should be considered, the authors felt that the items on the left should have more influence on how people approach their work.
As Scott Ambler explained:
Tools and processes are important, but it is more important to have competent people working together effectively.
Good documentation is useful in helping people to understand how the software is built and how to use it, but the main point of development is to create software, not documentation.
A contract is important but is no substitute for working closely with customers to discover what they need.
A project plan is important, but it must not be too rigid to accommodate changes in technology or the environment, stakeholders' priorities, and people's understanding of the problem and its solution.
Some of the authors formed the Agile Alliance, a non-profit organization that promotes software development according to the manifesto's values and principles. Introducing the manifesto on behalf of the Agile Alliance, Jim Highsmith said,
The Agile movement is not anti-methodology, in fact many of us want to restore credibility to the word methodology. We want to restore a balance. We embrace modeling, but not in order to file some diagram in a dusty corporate repository. We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes. We plan, but recognize the limits of planning in a turbulent environment. Those who would brand proponents of XP or SCRUM or any of the other Agile Methodologies as "hackers" are ignorant of both the methodologies and the original definition of the term hacker.
