The Agile Manifesto in English - 6

Principles

Agile principles are concretization of agile values.  Agile manifesto lists 12 principles. These principles are iterated in the form of assertive statements.

1.     Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Customer is raison d'être. Customer may be internal or external but customer is must. If customer is happy and willing to spend money lot of problems can be solved. In software development and maintenance, customer is looking forward to get his work done effectively and efficiently. Here comes the valuable software.

We also know that environment is dynamic in nature and customer also learn about software as he uses it. Despite of lot of efforts on simulation and other engaging techniques, customer learns about software as he starts using it. Plan heavy methodologies does not account for it. 

Then, how to make customer happy (or should I say delighted)? 

Deliver in small chunks frequently and collect feedback as soon as possible. Incorporate the feedback in next delivery in addition of new functionality. Wooh…, suddenly we are making customer happy and delivering software which is valuable to him.

In scrum, kanban, and devOps frameworks, this principle is reflected in following practices:

• Small sprint duration
•  Customer is always present for the devTeam
•  Prioritization of product backlog items
• Daily standup
•  Demo in the end of sprint
• Keeping WIP small
• Ambassador user
• Vertical slicing of user stories
•  Enough architecture
• Continuous product backlog grooming/refinement efforts