The Agile Manifesto in English - 13

Principles

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

8.     Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Software development and maintenance is not a 100 meter sprint but a marathon. It is marathon where not only devTeam members participate but stakeholders as well. 

To keep the sustainable pace for devTeam, agile promotes following:

• Minimal bureaucracy
• Self-organizing teams
• Ordinal scale based estimation than ratio and/or interval based
• High level of automation of mundane and/or repetitive tasks
• Continual job enrichment via promoting inverted triangle shaped skill set

For stakeholders (users and sponsors) also need to maintain a sustainable pace. Agile promotes following for stakeholders:

• Continuously in touch with devTeam
• Frequent delivery in small increments
• Small feedback cycles

Agile is not about delivering with lower cost or fast but delivering quality with verifiable and frequent small increments.

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

• Small sprint cycles
• Continuous product backlog grooming/refinement exercise
• Retrospective meeting
• PO acts as gatekeeper for requirements from customers and other stakeholders
• SM acts as agent to remove impediments
• DevTeam does ordinal scale based estimates
• Demo at end of each sprint
• Anyone can create a story/requirement but PO is the last authority to propose the same in sprint backlog
• Self-organizing team
• Inverted triangle shaped skill set