Agile has come to mean doing half of Scrum badly and using Jira.

– Andy Hunt, manifesto co-author

One of my favourite talks was Agile is Dead by Dave Thomas from GOTO Amsterdam 2015. Dave is one of the manifesto for agile software development authors and quite a charismatic and enjoyable guy to talk to. I consider his talk an essential primer to exploring the manifesto. Its creation has been talked about ad infinitum at conferences by the authors; Robert Martin, Kent Beck and the like.

In 2001, a bunch of programmers went to Utah for a couple days and decided that they wanted to write down the values that should be held when building software. These values were turned into a manifesto and published on a website where people could add their signature to say they support it. These values became very popular and can be heard in almost every software development office, hence why I’m still talking about it 20 years later.

Since then, the values have been lost behind the implementation. Let’s explore why.

The values are called The Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Agile as in Agility. Frisky. Energetic. It’s a way of doing a thing.

• ✅ An agile gymnast
• ✅ An agile programmer
• ✅ An agile methodology

However it’s commonly called The Agile Manifesto, with Agile as a capitalised noun, like it was God. However, Dave says, it was intended as an adjective, an in agility.

• ❌ Agile Alliance
• ❌ How to do Agile
• ❌ What is Agile
• ❌ 10 Way to know Agile is cheating on you

This move to noun-ise it has been created by people who wanted to sell things. An adjective can’t be sold, like a colour. “Here, have some green”. It doesn’t quite work, however a noun; green paint or green vegetables, can be sold.

Turning Agile into a saleable product was a huge success and has turned into an industry of its own. The One and Only Agile could be packaged and sold as training, certification, consultancy, and conferences. Businesses could order a Agile.

This is an industry that uses fear, ignorance, and bright new shiny things to sell. It can be full of new words that are confusing; Kanban, Spikes, Velocity. There are new rules. Gone is the hierarchical structure, QA teams, and time management. This incites fear in managers who are confused and feel they have to hire in a translator to make sense of it and make sure they’re doing it right. This has created a culture of shunning people who aren’t doing their version of Agile.

This commercial industry around Agile is nowhere close to the original values and spirit in which the manifesto was written. The original values of agility are still strong today. It’s time to go back to the original manifesto and reclaim agility.

Dave Thomas pitches his summaries version of what he things agility is as;

• Find out where you are
• Take a small step towards your goal
• Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
• Repeat
• When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier.

These points are focused on small iterations, fast feedback, historical learnings, and flexibility to change. Much like building a wall, you do it one brick at a time.

This works because no one can tell you how to work in your team. No book or course or certification knows how to work in your team, in your company, doing your project. Their rules probably won’t work for you. No rules are universal. All rules need context. Agile is not what you do. Agility is how you do it.

How can you know what to do?

You take small steps, assess, and change appropriately making sure your choices are changeable. Exactly in the points above. It’ll take courage. Change is never easy and going it alone is scary. However, it may be the only way to get back the original values.

Once you can change, you can start using the values.

• Self organisation. Trust people to get the job done.
• Working software. Always.
• Constant collaboration with teams and customers.
• Welcome change. Learning as we work.

These are simply the values in the manifesto.

Annoying, there is still context to my points of the manifesto. Working software means software that is useful and helps users, as anything else is a waste of time. Also you should work on overall progress rather than simply applying effort to software that may be useless.

The commercial Agile definition needs to die. The one true Agile needs to die. The rules of Agile needs to die.

The values of agile software development are still relevant. It’s my north star. To get there, there needs to be the ability to change.