What are Agile Principles?

All management gurus univocally argue that for bringing excellence in work place in today’s world one need to bring empowerment, collaboration, learning environment and opportunity to excel to the workforce. Agile development fits very well with 21st century management thinking. Its principles are fully aligned with this knowledge economy needs. They are:

• Customer Focus: Customer is the king in today’s world. Everyone has choices and power to choose. You can never be successful ignoring customer needs, his likings; his feelings need to account for. If you do not do it, someone else will do it. Therefore, it is essential to keep Customer at the nucleus of development cycle. Agile states this one as its first principle.

• Adaptive Planning: Planning is putting a schedule in future. Since it deals with future, longer planning horizon leads to larger inaccuracies in the plan. Agile believes in adaptive planning. You fine tune your plan as you progress. Progress brings better visibility and planning is more realistic.

• Verifiability Driven: The classical development suffered from lack of visibility. The customer did not know till he was shown a product at the time of delivery. Many times the product was not the one which customer needed. Agile believes in verifiability. Customer sees each feature being developed. He sees how it looks like. It helps in bringing out what is the best for the market and what is needed by the customer.

• Avoid wastage: Wastage is the cost. More wastage means high cost of development. When you reject a product at a later stage, it has to be redone. Very often a new design may be needed. It not only derails the schedule but also raises development cost abnormally. Therefore, Agile suggests customer involvement at each stage of development. Customer verifies the development through daily scrum meetings and helps in avoiding wastage of efforts.

• Collaboration: Collaboration is today’s world mantra. We have specialist in each area. They need to collaborate to bring a solid product. Agile brings them together. Agile is based on collaboration amongst different stakeholders like Product Owner, Sales, Designer, and Developer. The different agile ceremonies are the collaboration platforms. They are scrum meeting, sprint planning, sprint review meeting, Retrospective etc. Collaboration amongst the team members is the key in Agile.

• Visibility: CFO is the custodian of the budget and expenses in a company. Product owner needs to ensure that the development is completed on time and under the budget. Change control in classical development used to bring shock to these senior stakeholders. They did not know except through the progress report, how the project was progressing. The Project manager managed the project and often gave surprises. It is therefore necessary to bring visibility at all levels. Agile brings the same through its ceremonies. Customer knows how the project is shaping and what features are being built for next release?

• Technical Excellence: Technology is a complex stuff. It is used to develop a software. Very rarely a large proportion of technology features are exploited. At most if one works independently, one is about to utilize 20-30 % of available features. In the case of agile, collaboration, cross discussion amongst the stake holders helps utilize best out of the technology. Agile brings technical excellence.