California State University, Sacramento



AGILE today…“The Agile Manifesto resulted after that legendary group of individuals met at a Utah ski resort in February, 2001.It’s ironic that despite buy-in and adoption of the manifesto, most of what has been published, spoken about, and even practiced are things from the right half of the manifesto. You have probably used many of the common agile-related items such as Scrum, user stories, eXtreme Programming, test-driven development, product backlogs, task boards, and the list goes on and on. At a high level, the majority of these are either processes or tools. Yet the Agile Manifesto espouses individuals and interactions over processes and tools.So, why is there so much focus on process and tools? Because they are all enablers of the values depicted in the Agile Manifesto. For example, if you maintain a product backlog as part of the Scrum process, you have a prioritized list of features, and every four weeks (or whatever your iteration cycle is) you develop potentially shippable code. At the end of each iteration, the product owner helps the development team determine what they will develop next. You can easily see that these items enable “responding to change over following a plan", “working software over comprehensive documentations” and “customer collaboration over contract negotiation.”The one value that does not get as much attention is “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” One reason for this is because the majority of individuals in our industry started out in college as computer SCIENCE or software ENGINEERING students. Yet individuals and interactions focus more on psychology and human behavior. It is less black and white and less perfect. Arguably the most common and most complex issue companies and project teams typically face is related to human behavior and communication.In one of the first popular agile books, Agile Software Development, Alistair Cockburn introduced us to agile with an excellent discussion of the human side of developing software. He addressed culture, communicating, cooperation, and other “soft” subjects that are at the core of agile. Since that book was published in 2002, there has been sparse coverage.”From the Preface to “Individuals and Interactions and Agile Guide”, Ken Howard and Barry Rogers. ................
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