It takes ages to come to a collaboration and cooperation approach, specially when people are used to work in their own silos.

I resonate with you when you said “what is agile” is one of the most searched question and the count is going up.

For me, agile is not agile manifesto or different methodologies like scrum, XP etc… Agile is much more and beyond values, manifesto, principles and methodologies. It is much much deeper than all of these.

This is what I explained in my blog post

http://tusharsomaiya.com/wordpress/index.php/2012/01/agile/coaching-agile-teams/

Edited version of the post also features on ScrumAlliance.org at

http://scrumalliance.org/articles/395-coaching-agile-teams

What is agile? The Free Dictionary defines it as “characterized by quickness, lightness, and ease of movement.” Webster notes that it is “marked by ready ability to move with quick, easy grace.” The way I like to put it is, “Quickly responding to changes defines agility.”

In the context of software development, how quickly, lightly, easily, readily, and gracefully we respond to changes while developing software defines our agility. (Notice the word respond and not react.)

Hope this helps and adds value.

Can I have this post of yours on my site too?
Would you like to write a guest post exclusive for me?

Thanks in advance and best of luck for all you do.

Tushar Somaiya.
Agile Coach, Results Certified Coach & Servant Leader

Awesome blog you got here. Really helped me through my studies on agile development.

Thanks alot!

In short Waterfall model is one extreme and Agile is another extreme. We need to strive to achieve the perfect results of a waterfall model while using the pace and speed of an agile model. Try to think of the two models as a weighing balance where the product is stable only if the weights are equal.

Conclusion:
1.Just because a region has frequent earth quakes, it is wrong to infer that we do not require a blue print for constructing the house and changing the blueprint as and when new additions are made. On similar terms just because the requirements are changing it is wrong to conclude that changing requirements should not be recorded in a formal approach.
2. We need to aim at Earth Quake resistant houses that have good blue prints and with good explanation of all its whereabouts such as security features, positives and negatives that are not assumed but are explicitly stated. Similarly we need software that are robust and have all requirements captured and that have well documented artifacts that don’t make room for assumptions.

Nice blog you made here, I got a website about the waterfall Model and also about agile software development. I hope I can call your name here and there.. since you provided me with some really usefull information about agile.

I hope you can help me in my research for my master degree. I am trying to find out where the term Agile working came from and how it evolved.

I am trying to see if it is practical to make the back office employees in a finance company ‘Agile’, and how Agile could inpact on motivation and goverment directives.

Elaine

Kelly.

Ahmed.

THANKS

I would also recommend reading Damon Poole’s blog from Accurev. Some very insightful and regular posts that we find valuable.

http://www.accurev.com

Many thanks for the feedback…

Shared Vision is of course a very important principle of any project, whether it’s agile or not.

I wouldn’t include it in my key principles of agile, simply because I don’t think it’s a differentiator. Traditional development methods emphasise vision as much as agile methods.

Anyway, 11 key principles doesn’t have quite the same ring to it :-)

Kelly.

Check out my own top 6 on http://www.agilethoughts.dk – we pretty much agree on the other 5 ;-)

/Martin

Many thanks for your comment, it’s really great to get such positive feedback.

Kind regards

Kelly.

It is really good work. I am employing Agile Development Model for my current project. Earlier I employed RAD and Waterfall. But current situation makes me use Agile Development. Initially I am reluctant to accept that I am using Agile Development Model, as I did not know much about this. After reading your Blog, I can affirm that I am using this.

I found this blog is useful.

I will post my comments regularly.

Cheers!

Many thanks for the feedback.

I didn’t mean to imply that Microsoft hadn’t considered the 8% thing, i.e. that most people don’t use most of the features. I’m sure they did. And WordPad may well be the evidence of that.

I was just trying to highlight that software teams should proactively consider that fact too. And that maybe this is the basis for a strategy for the earlier iterations of a product’s development – business people may say that the product needs all the features – and they may be right. But general evidence is that products do not need to be that rich in functionality to attract the majority of its users.

Thanks for the feedback about the typos in my blog posts! I use Google’s Blogger platform to write my blog, which unfortunately has less than 8% of Word – perhaps even as little as 1%, and sadly not a spell check!!! I’ll go fix my typos :-)

Kelly.

Isn’t that called Word Pad? Does that mean that Microsoft already considered your argunment?

I did notice a few typos with some of the 10 Principles text… perhaps some of the other 92% of MS Word should have been utilised?

I am producing code to read data from a database then display it on a form. Should I wait until i’m done or would it be prudent to define the tests for the fields and such before I start?

Personally I like to define how I am going to test what I am working on rather than develop a test case or plug in unit testing after the fact.

What do you think?

Thanks.

Paul Klipp
agileactivist.com