The 12 Agile Principles - Part 17 (Video Training Course)

10. Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.

Much like the documentation of waterfall methods, traditional development does a large amount of unnecessary work. This work wastes time and resources and reduces how much the team can accomplish on the product. As such, the team is overall less efficient.

Agile development seeks to only do what is absolutely necessary. Documentation is kept to a minimum. Research is done at the last minute. Bugs are caught and fixed before developers move onto other tasks. For developers, this often means spending less time writing and reading specifications, and more time writing code.

11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

As with focusing on methods over the individual, traditional development assigns teams rather than allowing them to organize themselves. This often results in a team that is less cohesive. Certain team members may not work well together. Team members may have different plans for a project, and it can be difficult to reconcile these differences.

In Agile, teams organize themselves. This improves the architectures, requirements, and designs that the team creates. With developers, this allows them to find an environment where they work best. With the right teammates and ideas, a self-organized team is much more efficient.

12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Since waterfall development handles each step in one pass, there are no stopping points to look back and examine progress. The team must stick with their current methods until the end of the current project at least. After each project, the team can examine how things went and adapt for the next project. The problem with this is that every project is different, and what worked for one project may not be ideal for the next.

The cyclical nature of Agile software development means that there are numerous stopping points to look at the team’s progress. The end of every sprint shows a small slice of every step in the process. Therefore, after each sprint, the entire team can look back on what went well, what went badly and adjust to improve the next sprint. These are accomplished within the same project, so there is ample time to improve the project before the end. For developers, this means being more cognizant of their own work, and how they interface with others. By the end of each sprint, developers need to know how the process can be improved. Without an opinion, things will remain at status quo.

The twelve Agile principles are obviously a lot of material, but they all do have tremendous value. For developers, especially, the Agile principles create a cohesive and more productive team. By cutting out all of the unnecessary parts of traditional development and encouraging communication, Agile creates an environment that generates quality code efficiently.

The 12 Agile Principles – Part 17 (Video Training Course)

10. Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.

11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Recommended Further Reading

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