Agile Manifesto - history page

The Manifesto - "Values" page - http://agilemanifesto.org/

The principles  - http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

and (!)

The history - http://agilemanifesto.org/history.html

• The "historian" - Jim Highsmith
• Agile term - Martin Fowler idea
• All - "delighted by the final phrasing" (Alistair Cockburn)
• Biggest debate .... the  location
• Purpose: "get all the lightweight method leaders in one room." (Robert C. Martin)
• Jim Highsmith: "The Agile movement is not anti-methodology, in fact, many of us want to restore credibility to the word methodology"

Why to read this history page? Values and principles are not enough?

In fact, you can find on this story of Jim Highsmith some very interesting stuff about Agile and directly from the source some motivations related to selection of these values and principles. Some examples below.

"We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes"

 Yes, you are a "traditionalist" and you like document, but ... you have a positive response to these questions:

• Do you keep your documentation updated, so its truth value it is true?
• How useful it is this documentation?
• The effort to keep the documentation update is too high?

 

"We plan, but recognize the limits of planning in a turbulent environment"

Read  first  (in the same page) the story of Kent Beck about a "Dilbertesque organization". You cannot make plans and then change the plan hypotheses and believe that will still work. The "turbulent environment" it is in fact the default for software development. The requirements will change? The solution are standardized?

Thank you Jim Highsmith for this page of history!