Seventeen people, a ski lodge in Utah, and 68 words that reorganised how software gets built — and what the sentence everyone misquotes says.
In February 2001, seventeen practitioners met at a lodge in Snowbird, Utah. They
disagreed about almost everything methodological. What they could agree on fitted on one
page, and it has outlasted every method any of them was advocating.
The four values
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
The twelve principles
Behind the values sit twelve principles. They are more concrete, and more demanding.
The ones that most often go missing in practice:
- Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of
months, with a preference for the shorter timescale. - Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
- Working software is the primary measure of progress. Not velocity, not the
percentage of a plan completed. - Sustainable pace — the sponsors, developers and users should be able to
maintain a constant pace indefinitely. - At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then
tunes its behaviour accordingly. This principle is why the Retrospective exists. - Simplicity — the art of maximising the amount of work not done.
Why it still matters
Twenty-odd years on, the interesting thing about the Manifesto is not that it was
right about everything. It is that it named a trade-off honestly, and refused to
pretend the right-hand column was worthless.
Most of what gets called “agile” today fails that test — it either
abandons the right-hand column entirely, or it keeps every artefact of the old process
and adds stand-ups.
Next
Next: what Scrum is — the framework that implements these ideas as a small set of events, artefacts and accountabilities.
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