In a post about the agile manifesto on his blog, David Peterson claims that the Agile Manifesto needs to be rewritten as it kills the Agile initiative.
Personally I think that the Agile Manifesto is good as it is. It doesn’t attack any methodology nor does it say use Extreme Programming; it merely states a philosophical view of the agile; i.e. the things, we as agilists value the most. The problem is that people don’t read or understand the principles behind the manifesto.
For many people I have met so far in the IT industry, agile is not writing documentation… Which is a very big misconception about agile methods. The Agile world needs to reduce the gap (as David explains in a wonderful article, How do we widen agile adoption) between the business world and agile.
I believe that we need, as David explains in the later article, to find a way to do presentations/workshops for the business world, so that they understand what this is all about and how we can learn from each other to bring real value to the business.
Having said that I smell an opportunity there. With the help of the Software Craftsmanship Paradigm we can actually revitalize the Agile and Lean world and bridge that gap that we are currently seeing in the IT world.
David Peterson
/ December 24, 2008I think you’ve hit the nail on the head: people don’t read or understand the principles behind the manifesto. They take the left-hand-side of the middle bit of the manifesto and that’s it.
So documentation isn’t agile, Lean/Kanban isn’t agile because it’s process-heavy, etc. But we’re agile because we don’t write documentation and we don’t do any planning, we just slap it together and hope for the best. That’s truly agile, right?
The manifesto needs to be revisited to prevent cowboy coders claiming to be agile. It needs to attack this threat otherwise it will eventually bring down the brand.
Enrique Comba Riepenhausen
/ December 24, 2008@David Peterson
I totally agree that we have to make sure that we protects the interests, values and principles of Agile Software Development from rouge coders that taint it’s name and value.
As you mentioned in the previous article of yours about the agile adoption, I think that we need to open up the community to include the business side of the industry and make them understand what agile really means in order to protect them from that threat.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation!
We need to start thinking more globally and get out of the niche we are in right now. Agile seems to be just something the technical people do… and that needs to change!