Head First Agile

Chapter 2. Agile values and principles: Mindset meets method

There’s no “perfect” recipe for building great software.

Some teams have had a lot of success and seen big improvements after adopting agile practices, methods, and methodologies, while others have struggled. We’ve learned that the difference is the mindset that the people on the team have. So what do you do if you want to get those great agile results for your own team? How do you make sure your team has the right mindset? That’s where the Agile Manifesto comes in. When you and your team get your head around its values and principles, you start to think differently about the agile practices and how they work, and they start to become a lot more effective.

Something big happened in Snowbird

In the 1990s there was a growing movement throughout the software development world. Teams were growing tired of the traditional way of building software using a waterfall process, where the team first defines strict requirements, then draws up a complete design, and builds out all of the software architecture on paper before the code is written.

Note

People on waterfall teams weren’t always 100% clear on exactly why they didn’t like their process, but there was a lot of agreement that it was somehow too “heavyweight” and cumbersome.

By the end of the decade, there was a growing consensus that teams needed a more “lightweight” ...