AGILE IN ACTION

At Agile2008, in his banquet keynote, Uncle Bob proposed over execution" be added to the Agile Manifesto as the fifth value statement. I've blogged before about the lack of craftsmanship in software development and it continues to concern me.

Brian Marick has identified four values the Agile Manifesto left out : 1) Skill You need competent people. 2) Discipline You need self-disciplined people to perform the practices correctly and maintain rhythm and frequency of delivery. You need people to execute well. 3) Ease You need people who invest effort into making their lives easy. This is not about shirking responsibilities or avoiding making commitments. It's about reducing pain. For example, technical people maintain a code base that is habitable, where changes are comfortable to perform, by employing test-driven development and refactoring, and by fixing defects as they are found, minimising technical debt, and maintaining executable code through continuous integration. The value of ease should apply to everyone and all aspects of work. 4) Joy You need people who insist on experiencing joy. People deserve to have fun at work. When people are skilled and disciplined, experiencing joy at work has only healthy and beneficial side effects.

Here is Jason Yip's more personable version of the Agile Manifesto .

At the previous Agile Practitioners Forum , Colin MacAndrew asked the group "Does the Agile Manifesto need refactoring?" and it was encouraging to see quite a few people leap to its defence. Now, Colin simply asked a question about whether it could be improved, he didn't state that it needed to be re-written. And yet the defence of the Manifesto was so vehement it took me a little by surprise. There's a spark for an interesting debate here. I think it's one worth pursuing in a future meeting. I hope that everyone agrees that the Agile Manifesto is an important guiding text. However, it should not be sacrosanct. Some months ago I bought a new mountain bike. Before I left the shop the assistant reminded me to bring the bike back in 6 weeks for a free service - to "tighten some of the nuts and bolts that may have worked loose during its initial use and to check everything remains in working order", he said. Now, maybe the Manifesto is still right on the mark, but unless we take the time to review its statements and principles (through debate) given what we've learned about agility in the 6 years since its inception, we won't know if there are a few "nuts and bolts that need tightening". Brian Marick recently posted :

Part of the Agile Manifesto says: