In this article, you’ll find a brief synopsis of the Agile Manifesto. This easy-to-follow guide provides an overview of this approach, and uncovers its impact on the software development industry.
The Agile methodology has revolutionized software development and project management over the past two decades. At its core are four key values that form the foundation of the Agile manifesto. These values provide guidance on delivering projects flexibly and efficiently by prioritizing individuals, working software, customer collaboration, and embracing change.
In this guide, we will explore what each of the four Agile values means and how to apply them in practice. Understanding these principles is essential for transforming teams and organizations to be more Agile.
Overview of the Four Agile Values
The four core values of Agile as outlined in 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
These statements outline that while there is value on the right side of each phrase, the Agile approach places higher emphasis on the left side. The values focus on people, adaptable solutions, customer partnership, and embracing evolving requirements.
Agile Value #1: Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools
The first value in the Agile manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” This emphasizes the importance of individuals working together effectively over strictly following processes or relying on tools
Some key points for this Agile value:
-
Focus on enabling collaboration through communication, relationships, and knowledge sharing. Processes and tools should support this, not hinder it.
-
Value people’s expertise, insight, motivations and goals. Understand teammates as individuals.
-
Promote teamwork, collective ownership and swarming to solve problems. Bring the right people together as needed.
-
Enable self-organization and decision making instead of top-down management. Trust teams to figure out the best solutions.
-
Have just enough processes to enable progress. Avoid rigid, cumbersome workflows that slow things down.
This Agile principle recognizes that motivated people who communicate well are the key to delivering great results. Technical solutions and management processes should empower teams, not restrict them.
Agile Value #2: Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation
The second Agile value promotes “Working software over comprehensive documentation.” The focus should be on continuously delivering working solutions, not getting bogged down by excessive documentation.
Key aspects of this value:
-
Prioritize building, testing and deploying working software in small increments over extensive written specs.
-
Focus documentation on just enough planning to start building, then evolve details iteratively.
-
Write documentation such as user stories and product requirements at a high level to provide flexibility for implementation.
-
Use verbal communication and collaboration tools to streamline information sharing. Produce only essential documentation.
-
Evaluate progress by functional software delivered, not thick paper specifications sitting on a shelf.
The goal is to create usable solutions early and often to deliver real value to customers. Just enough documentation should be done to support development, while excessive paperwork and models can slow progress.
Agile Value #3: Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation
Value number three promotes “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.” This emphasizes working closely with customers over formal agreements and arrangements.
Key points on customer collaboration:
-
Engage customers actively and frequently through onboarding, interviews, surveys, usability testing, early demos, etc.
-
Understand customer perspectives, challenges and true needs instead of relying on assumptions.
-
Welcome changing requirements as customer needs evolve. Maintain flexibility to adapt solutions.
-
Focus on delivering value vs. strictly adhering to original contracts or specs. Allow for adjustments when needed.
-
Build solutions iteratively with customer input vs. designing everything up front in isolation.
-
Collaborate as partners, not strictly as client and vendor. Avoid an adversarial relationship.
The goal is to truly understand customers and deliver solutions tailored to their needs. This requires close collaboration and shared ownership, not just negotiating agreements upfront and handing off requirements.
Agile Value #4: Responding to Change Over Following a Plan
The fourth Agile value is “Responding to change over following a plan.” In dynamic environments, Agile teams should be able to quickly adapt.
Key aspects of responding to change:
-
Welcome changing requirements and priorities, even late in development. View change as an opportunity, not a threat.
-
Maintain flexibility in plans and designs to accommodate new customer needs or technical challenges.
-
Make incremental plans in shorter timeframes to adapt quicker. Avoid extensive upfront planning and rigid schedules.
-
Review and adjust plans regularly as more is learned about the problem space and solution.
-
Enable rapid iteration and pivoting of technical designs and product features based on feedback.
-
Focus on predictable delivery vs. defined delivery by embracing uncertainty in plans.
The goal is to inspect and adapt quickly to volatile conditions instead of blindly following predefined, rigid plans. Agile teams thrive on change.
Applying the Four Agile Values
The four Agile values provide foundational guidance for being effective in dynamic, fast-paced environments. Some tips for applying these values:
-
Start with people – Build collaborative, high-trust teams. Foster relationships and communication.
-
Deliver early and often – Focus on continuous delivery of working solutions.
-
Partner closely with customers – Involve customers actively throughout projects.
-
Embrace change – Maintain flexibility in plans and designs to pivot quickly.
-
Take an iterative approach – Develop solutions incrementally in small batches with feedback loops.
-
Keep just enough process – Have only as much structure as needed to enable progress. Avoid bureaucracy.
-
Maximize business value – Prioritize features that deliver the most customer benefit.
-
Promote transparency – Share information cross-functionally to enable collaboration and alignment.
These values require a substantial mindset shift from traditional waterfall development. But adopting these principles positions organizations to thrive in competitive, rapidly evolving markets.
The Agile Manifesto and 12 Principles
The four key values outlined above form the heart of the Agile Manifesto introduced in 2001. The manifesto also defines 12 principles to guide implementation of Agile methodologies. These provide more specific guidance around delivering value quickly, embracing change, collaboration and teamwork.
While the four values define the “whys” of Agile, the 12 principles detail more of the “hows” to put these ideals into practice. Key aspects include:
- Delivering working software frequently in weeks rather than months
- Welcoming changing requirements even late in development
- Maintaining a constant pace indefinitely
- Producing the best designs through self-organizing teams
- Reflecting regularly as a team to become more effective
Together, the values and principles form the backbone of the Agile methodology. They provide crucial perspective on why and how to develop products flexibly and iteratively by empowering teams.
Key Benefits of the Agile Values and Principles
Applying the four Agile values and 12 principles in product development can offer many advantages, including:
-
Increased efficiency – By eliminating wasteful activities that don’t directly deliver customer value. Agile focuses effort on the critical 20% that provides 80% of the benefit.
-
Faster time-to-market – Through iterative development, continuous delivery and maintaining simplicity.
-
Reduced risk – By delivering smaller increments for feedback to detect problems early.
-
Better alignment – With customers through active collaboration and transparency between business and technical teams.
-
Improved quality – Through early testing, rapid feedback loops and direct communication between team members.
-
Higher team productivity – By empowering self-organization, leveraging individual talents, and promoting collaboration.
-
Greater adaptability to change – Via incremental delivery, flexible planning and a culture that welcomes change.
These benefits allow Agile teams to build better solutions that deliver more value in less time.
Summary of the Four Agile Values
The four key values from the Agile Manifesto provide core guiding principles for developing products successfully in dynamic, rapidly changing environments. These values call for:
-
Individuals and interactions – Communicating effectively and leveraging individual expertise
-
Working software – Delivering functional solutions early and often
-
Customer collaboration – Working in partnership with users
-
Responding to change – Embracing evolving requirements and priorities
Together, these values promote flexible, iterative development focused on continuous delivery of customer value through empowered, collaborative teams. By embracing the four Agile values and 12 principles, organizations can gain significant benefits in productivity, quality, speed, and adaptability. Understanding these foundations is key for transforming teams to be more Agile.
The Twelve Agile Manifesto Principles
The Twelve Principles are the guiding principles for the methodologies that are included under the title “The Agile Movement.” They describe a culture in which change is welcome, and the customer is the focus of the work. They also demonstrate the movement’s intent as described by Alistair Cockburn, one of the signatories to the Agile Manifesto, which is to bring development into alignment with business needs.
The twelve principles of agile development include:
- Customer satisfaction through early and continuous software delivery – Customers are happier when they receive working software at regular intervals, rather than waiting extended periods of time between releases.
- Accommodate changing requirements throughout the development process – The ability to avoid delays when a requirement or feature request changes.
- Frequent delivery of working software – Scrum accommodates this principle since the team operates in software sprints or iterations that ensure regular delivery of working software.
- Collaboration between the business stakeholders and developers throughout the project – Better decisions are made when the business and technical team are aligned.
- Support, trust, and motivate the people involved – Motivated teams are more likely to deliver their best work than unhappy teams.
- Enable face-to-face interactions – Communication is more successful when development teams are co-located.
- Working software is the primary measure of progress – Delivering functional software to the customer is the ultimate factor that measures progress.
- Agile processes to support a consistent development pace – Teams establish a repeatable and maintainable speed at which they can deliver working software, and they repeat it with each release.
- Attention to technical detail and design enhances agility – The right skills and good design ensures the team can maintain the pace, constantly improve the product, and sustain change.
- Simplicity – Develop just enough to get the job done for right now.
- Self-organizing teams encourage great architectures, requirements, and designs – Skilled and motivated team members who have decision-making power, take ownership, communicate regularly with other team members, and share ideas that deliver quality products.
- Regular reflections on how to become more effective – Self-improvement, process improvement, advancing skills, and techniques help team members work more efficiently.
The intention of Agile is to align development with business needs, and the success of Agile is apparent. Agile projects are customer focused and encourage customer guidance and participation. As a result, Agile has grown to be an overarching view of software development throughout the software industry and an industry all by itself.
The Four Values of The Agile Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto is comprised of four foundational values and 12 supporting principles which lead the Agile approach to software development. Each Agile methodology applies the four values in different ways, but all of them rely on them to guide the development and delivery of high-quality, working software.
1. Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools The first value in the Agile Manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” Valuing people more highly than processes or tools is easy to understand because it is the people who respond to business needs and drive the development process. If the process or the tools drive development, the team is less responsive to change and less likely to meet customer needs. Communication is an example of the difference between valuing individuals versus process. In the case of individuals, communication is fluid and happens when a need arises. In the case of process, communication is scheduled and requires specific content.
2. Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation Historically, enormous amounts of time were spent on documenting the product for development and ultimate delivery. Technical specifications, technical requirements, technical prospectus, interface design documents, test plans, documentation plans, and approvals required for each. The list was extensive and was a cause for the long delays in development. Agile does not eliminate documentation, but it streamlines it in a form that gives the developer what is needed to do the work without getting bogged down in minutiae. Agile documents requirements as user stories, which are sufficient for a software developer to begin the task of building a new function. The Agile Manifesto values documentation, but it values working software more.
3. Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation Negotiation is the period when the customer and the product manager work out the details of a delivery, with points along the way where the details may be renegotiated. Collaboration is a different creature entirely. With development models such as Waterfall, customers negotiate the requirements for the product, often in great detail, prior to any work starting. This meant the customer was involved in the process of development before development began and after it was completed, but not during the process. The Agile Manifesto describes a customer who is engaged and collaborates throughout the development process, making. This makes it far easier for development to meet their needs of the customer. Agile methods may include the customer at intervals for periodic demos, but a project could just as easily have an end-user as a daily part of the team and attending all meetings, ensuring the product meets the business needs of the customer.
4. Responding to Change Over Following a Plan Traditional software development regarded change as an expense, so it was to be avoided. The intention was to develop detailed, elaborate plans, with a defined set of features and with everything, generally, having as high a priority as everything else, and with a large number of many dependencies on delivering in a certain order so that the team can work on the next piece of the puzzle.
With Agile, the shortness of an iteration means priorities can be shifted from iteration to iteration and new features can be added into the next iteration. Agile’s view is that changes always improve a project; changes provide additional value.
Perhaps nothing illustrates Agile’s positive approach to change better than the concept of Method Tailoring, defined in An Agile Information Systems Development Method in use as: “A process or capability in which human agents determine a system development approach for a specific project situation through responsive changes in, and dynamic interplays between contexts, intentions, and method fragments.” Agile methodologies allow the Agile team to modify the process and make it fit the team rather than the other way around.
The Agile Manifesto – 4 Agile Values Explained
FAQ
What are the 4 Agile values?
What are the 4 core values of SAFe?
What are 5 Scrum values?
How many values and principles are there in Agile?
What are the 4 values in Agile Manifesto?
The 4 values as stipulated in the Agile Manifesto are as follows. 1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools To be agile means to be all-in on people. The first value of the Agile Manifesto might be the most ahead of its time. The authors knew that people mattered and collaboration was essential.
What are the 4 core agile values?
Below are the 4 core agile values: 1. Individual and interaction over using process and tools: The success of the team is determined by the ability to communicate effectively and efficiently. Other things such as the tools and the processes used are of less importance.
What is agile value 4?
Agile value #4 is about being flexible. The world around us is rapidly changing. When looking at business, change can come in many forms: Market change. There is less demand for your solution when finished. New technology. It may be easier to do things than before. Competitors. A competitor beats you with a better solution. Regulations.
What are the 12 principles of Agile software development?
The 12 principles of agile software development as outlined in the Agile Manifesto are as follows: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
