This came through on the Agile Project Management group today from Mike Beedle of Scrum fame. A nice summary of how we got the “agile“ moniker and a few things to think about.
> Actually, "Agility" (and especially "Business Agility")
> pre-dates XP, etc.
Yes, it does. In fact, the word "agile", as in "agile development"
was chosen because it was thought to be a good "sales" word among
upper management -- something managers could understand and
associate with it as something cool but without any
connotations of failure.
If you recall, there was a "Business Agility" wave circa (95-97),
that "never failed".. perhaps because the Internet wave took over,
or perhaps because its lack of overall specificity. Either
way, "Agile" was a cool word with management and not associated
with failure, "being passe", high risk, or high expenses,
like BPR, TQM, Knowledge Management, Future Creating Company,
or Learning Organization.
When we were at Snowbird in 2001, we proposed many words:
adaptable, lightweight, lean, adaptive, essential,
people-oriented, value-oriented, (and many more I can't recall),
I proposed that "agile": word for the above reasons.
(Of course, the rest of the group voted for it.)
In my opinion, some things "were lost" from the meeting.
Here are some things that still remain to be fully explored:
Values
------
- Trust
- Respect
- Sharing Knowledge
- Constant Learning
- People over Process
- Communication
- Feedback
- Simplicity
- Courage
- Truth of the code/Executable
using the code to learn
Principles
----------
Customer Value
Individual Capability
Collaboration
Adaptation
Simplicity
Customer connected to process
Integrated Testing
Short Cycles
Lots of feedback
Social Networks
Feedback outside of the team
Always ready to ship
Deliberate Diversity
Minimal Roles
Minimal Artifacts
Low Bureaucracy
X functional teams