Agile Manifesto

It's just a list of preferences.

If you don't read that Agile Manifesto, it's like, you know, we prefer to do things this way to that way.

But in following that event, there have been lots of practices built up around getting away from this idea of a linear flow, because it doesn't matter how good your plans are.

You're going to get hit in the face and then everything's going to have to change.

And so I'm kind of curious if there's any specific kind of clear delineated difference between a waterfall process and an agile process other than the size of the scope of the planned work.

I just dropped.

If you read the agile manifesto, I said that there's some values.

It's four lines.

Cool, cool.

And, and I, I, I didn't, I think in the, uh, the information you sent us, I'd not realized this, that you were actually invited to the, uh, to the Agile Manifesto meetup, but you didn't ski, so you didn't go.

So [chuckles]-

That's right.

He's been a programmer since the 1970s.

He's a co-author of the Agile Manifesto and the first chairman of the Agile Alliance.

And he's the founder of Uncle Bob Consulting.

He's written a lot of books that have defined parts of the industry, like Clean Code and Clean Architecture, Clean Agile, and his newest release, Functional Design.

And maybe similar to your opening question is we've created.

So the Agile Manifesto and the 12 principles are very, very simple.

And if you read them and you adhere to them, that is what being agile is about.

But obviously people had challenges with that.

It looks like an awful website from the early 1990s.

It's like agilemanifesto.org. And so what I love about that group of people that is kind of fuzzy in that old picture is is that human beings took up the idea that you could build meaningful things out of code in the mid 60s.

Right.

And by the end, 30 years later, 25, you know, in the early 60s, you know, approximately 30 years later, early 90s, the people who were the first generation of humans to ever try and build something useful out of code instead of aluminum or wood and metal or silicon or something else got together.

First is you and I both worked on the Makers Manifesto together.

And kind of an evolution of the Agile Manifesto, what some basic principles for building in this age.

What were the things that were really important to you? What did you really want to see in this? And what is the more general advice that you are giving to everyone as a result of this experience?

I think what people get caught up with building, and I'm seeing this time and time again, is distribution is the product problem right now.

It's a learning loop.

You need to run as early as you're doing the rest of your product discovery.

And so for me, that was a really critical part to come into the Agile Manifesto.

And it's something that I felt quite passionate about.

Thomas moved to the United States from England in 1994 and lives north of Dallas, Texas.

Thomas coined the phrases code, cata, and dry, don't repeat yourself, was an original signatory and author of the Agile Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

He studied computer science at Imperial College London.

Now, Andy Hunt is a writer of books on software development and chill sci-fi.

Hunt co-authored the seminal text, The Pragmatic Programmer, the popular pragmatic thinking and learning, award-winning practices of an agile developer, a half dozen other books, and many articles.

Andy was one of the 17 original authors of The Agile Manifesto.

He and co-author Dave Thomas founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf Publishing House, specializing in books for software developers, testers, and managers.

I think we've alluded to this in the podcast where I mentioned this before, but it still is crazy to me that like we're reading a book by the guy who invented dry.

We are.

So in last week's one, we did the Agile Manifesto.

This week, we are talking about the 12 Agile principles that support the Agile Manifesto.

So Anu, what is your thought on the principles at the moment?

that nobody really pays any attention to them.

They're overlooked.

They're forgotten.

I blame that old, the original Agile Manifesto website, which still looks the way it did when they launched it in 03 or 04, whatever it was.

Is there a hill you'll absolutely die on or an opinion that would be very hard to change your mind on?

The most overlooked Agile principle out of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development is simplicity.

The art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential.

It's overlooked all the time because Agile people are scared to say this in organizations, but Lean is baked into Agile and it's driving the focus on effectiveness over efficiency.