What is Agile Software Development Manifesto: Introduction

Agile Software Development Manifesto is a set of principles intended to guide agile software development. It outlines the values and principles that should guide the agile software development lifecycle. Mission is to articulate core values and philosophies appropriate for agile software development and to address Agile principles and values specific obstacles.

History of Agile Manifesto:

The software industry is changing and developing. Because of its rapid pace, software management has been evolving with consistency. Software managers have their heads spinning around in an ever-changing industry without constructing physical structures to preserve their values and development.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development originated in 2001, as a collaborative effort of 17 brilliant developers in Utah. Defining 4 Values and 12 principles to guide Software Development, they changed the software development profession to be more efficient, effective, and reliable. Agile Alliance gave the Agile Software Development Manifesto by which they sought to provide a new perspective on software management.

The Agile Methodology in Software Management:

The Agile Alliance of Agile Manifesto looked for alternatives to “Waterfall Model” of software development. This model states that you design, develop, test, and release a new version of software on a predefined schedule. Agile development has no use for the Waterfall model and aims at a new way of coming up with software.

Agile Alliance sought to reduce the use of time, resources, and team coordination by eliminating obsolete and unproductive practices. Iterative and incremental development falls into Agile development is a product development approach that uses less structured and rigorous approaches. Agile is emerging as a framework that fosters knowledge, while preserving company values, culture, and morality.

Agile Manifesto Technical Frameworks:

Scrum, Extreme Programming, and its subset Crystal Framework could all be methods of achieving Agile Software Development Manifesto.

1. Scrum Framework:

Scrum framework is a popular framework in software development. In order to help improve productivity and communication between software developers in the organization, it focuses on small tasks. It finds the best way to accomplish each task and improves its process in the middle of a project. When using the Scrum framework, project teams need to determine their resources and set a timeline, while creating a backlog, sprint planning, and so on.

2. Extreme Programming:

Extreme programming has become a notation of distributed agile processes and software development lifecycle. The projects involve several roles such as product owner, software engineer, tester, business analyst and customer. This framework requires frequent delivery of functionality in order to build a successful software system on time and on budget for business stakeholders.

3. Crystal Framework:

Crystal framework values interactions of individuals, and they focus less on processes and tools. It also focuses on adaptions in order to achieve its outcomes. This framework is an agile framework in that they follow a user-first, democratic approach. The goal is to make working with teams easy, convenient, and flexible.

4 Values of Agile Software Development Manifesto

The four values defined by the Agile Alliance in Agile Manifesto are:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools:

This value is about self-organization and that a working software process is not a replacement for individual work. It is about having empathy towards others and not being judgmental. Also, it is about understanding everyone’s individual needs and situation.

2. Working software over comprehensive documentation:

With a working software process, personal knowledge is gained through a process that is not a replacement for individual work. Documentation is crucial. But a working software process can be the key to helping everyone in the workplace who needs help getting their work done efficiently.

3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation:

Contracts always have clear guidelines and detailed work with a small number of approvals needed. Your customers will feel like they have input into your project through a working software process. You will have clear guidelines and the ability to control when changes are needed.

4. Responding to change over following a plan:

A response to a change in the original plan should not be delayed nor negatively affected by unexpected changes. Also, this will help to keep your clients on board with the project. Some changes happen with no notice, so you need to keep your timeline on track with this in mind.

12 Principles of Agile Manifesto:

The twelve principles curated by Agile software development Manifesto are:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

‍2. Welcome to changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

‍3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

‍4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

‍5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

‍6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

‍7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.

‍8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

‍9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.

11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

‍12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Benefits of Agile Manifesto:

Agile Manifesto aims to enable developers to develop quality software, allow the user to decide at any stage of software development. Business and customer needs can manage their requirements with relative ease. The software managers who practice agile development can concentrate on the project to manage, and not on the project to create. Agile teams are more productive and customer dependent. Agile organizations build software memories and processes that provide feedback, stretch goals, and goal setting.

Ever since 2001, the Agile Manifesto has been adopted, adapted, and revised by much software development teams across the world. With the growth in knowledge, management principles such as scrum and agile are becoming the best practices in software development and systems management. Also, productivity and utilization of resources are increasing because of agile development and utilization. Managers and team members control the management of the entire lifecycle.

Is It Still Relevant in Today’s Era?

The world has changed since 2001, and so have the software development techniques, yet the Agile Manifesto remains popular today. Agile Manifesto is designed to stress the quality of software development when creating a product. Additionally, it is a helpful guide for managers of software development, product managers, and other business leaders who wish to adopt Agile Manifesto.

There are some controversies with Agile Manifesto still going on. Some companies are quick to add Agile methodology in their processes. But they do not follow the real spirit of Agile principles. Many people are aware of the advantages of Agile development methodology. There is a lack of a standard practice for describing scope. This is the main reason in non-agile policies. They deny their own Agile principles; they describe scope in their own way according to their needs or their culture.

Examples of Companies That Follow Agile Manifesto

Barclays:

Barclays is a financial services conglomerate based in London. They applied the agile methodology on their back-end software. In a year, they had 300% increase in output and code complexity reduced 50% across almost 80 applications. Agile produces such amazing results, but it is hard for managers to change from a conservative process to anything new. However, the agile methodology just gives a clear guidance on how to improve their processes. Only once the right things have been implemented in their processes, you can count on seeing significant productivity gains.

Ericsson:

Ericsson is one of the largest multinational company providing communications services. At first, Ericsson’s Media Gateway for Mobile Networks worked on waterfall model. Later, some teams moved to agile. The teams experimented with scrum to improve the performance of the team. Since they have been using it, they have achieved increase in productivity and reduced the size of the product. So, now Ericsson is also a commonly seen as a team using scrum.

Fitbit:

Fitbit is one of the most popular products in the consumer electronics and the fitness market. This is mainly because of their goal of making fitness achievable and usable for everyone. The implemented Scrum method and XP can be seen in the project “Fitbit App”. The project in development process was owned by the senior management. It met the needs of the holiday-orientated product delivery schedule. Customers grew and employee count increased. It ended in an increase in estimated outcome value.

Royal Philips:

Royal Philips is a Dutch electronics company headquartered in Eindhoven, Netherlands with sales offices in more than 20 countries worldwide. They adopted the Agile software development framework, which has helped them reduce average release cycle time from 18 months to 6 only.

Final Word:

Agile Manifesto has laid out a set of values and principles when it comes to software management. There are many approaches when it comes to software management. The manifesto is simply a set of guidelines, explicitly stating the benefits and principles, and leaves the decision-making up to the companies. With fast-paced changes in technology and competitive markets, Agile Manifesto has remained relevant. The scrum framework is also applicable in many other industries and situations.