Notes:
There is a website (http://www.agilealliance.org/) that promotes the “Agile Manifesto” - the key values of which are listed above.
In keeping with my earlier comments about the difficulty of complete and exact communication everyone involved seems to have their own interpretation of the meaning of these words. I have mine... :)
There is a definite tendency of management to focus on what can be measured: production of screen layouts, counting lines of code, with less interest in whether these are “fit for purpose” - which is hard to measure directly.
Equally, with initiatives like TickIT/ISO9000 “Quality Assurance” tends to focus on measuring conformance to process – again with less interest on whether the process is delivering quality. And, as Neil Martin related in his keynote last year (“Software Quality Standards Clean Pipes, Dirty Water”), this tends to reduce variability – not deliver quality.
The Agile values are a reaction to this, they point out:
That having the right people working together is more important than whether the steps they follow are “approved” by the process;
That time spent getting the software working is better spent than time spent writing documentation that won't be referred to;
That communication with the customer a better way to define the aims of the project than writing a contract; and,
That plans do not survive contact with reality.