Quotes About Agile

In fact, in an agile project, technical excellence is measured by both capacity to deliver customer value today and create an adaptable product for tomorrow.

The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge.

Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities.

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.

The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental.

Agile Project Management is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model.

The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers.

The feature delivery approach helps define a workable interface between customers and product developers.

The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects.

Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews—product, technical, process, team—is also self-correcting.

Traditional waterfall methods deliver value at the end of the project, often months or years after the project begins. Agile projects can deliver value quickly and incrementally during the life of the project. Capturing value early and often can significantly improve a project's return on investment, and utilizing iterative, feature-based delivery is the cornerstone practice in making that happen.

In my early years of iterative development, I thought timeboxes were actually about time. What I came to realize is that timeboxes are actually about forcing tough decisions.

If your goal is to deliver a product that meets a known and unchanging specification, then try a repeatable process. However, if your goal is to deliver a valuable product to a customer within some targeted boundaries, when change and deadlines are significant factors, then reliable Agile processes work better.

For an agile project, the ensemble includes core team members, customers, suppliers, executives, and other participants who interact with each other in various ways. It is these interactions, and the tacit and explicit information exchanges that occur within them, that project management practices need to facilitate.

The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects. Although constraints such as cost and time are important, they should be secondary to creating value for customers. All too often, we focus on what is easily measurable and ignore really important characteristics that are harder to quantify. Agile development attempts to change that bias and focus on the most important things, and value is at the top of that list.

A team can employ agile practices, but it won't achieve the potential benefit of agile development without embracing agile values and principles.

Agile Project Management focuses on selecting the right skills for project team members and molding them into productive teams.

rinciples, or "rules" in complexity theory terminology, affect how tools and practices are implemented. Practices are how principles are acted out. Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor. Conversely, specific practices in the absence of guiding principles are often inappropriately used. Although the use of agile practices may vary from team to team, the principles are constant. Principles are the simple rules of complex human adaptive systems.

Creativity and innovation are the emergent results of well functioning agile teams.

Anyone who practices ad hoc development under the guise of agile methods is an imposter.

The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day.

Self-organizing teams form the core of APM. They blend freedom and responsibility, flexibility and structure. In the face of inconsistency and ambiguity, the teams strive to consistently deliver on the product vision within the project constraints. Accomplishing this requires teams with a self-organizing structure and self-disciplined individual team members. Building this kind of team is the core of an agile project leader's job.

The agile movement supports individuals and teams through dedication to the concepts of self-organization, self-discipline, egalitarianism, respect for individuals, and competency. "Agile" is a socio-technical movement driven by both the desire to create a particular work environment and the belief that an adaptive environment is critical to the goal of delivering innovative products to customers.

That was pretty ninja.