The Authors of the Agile Manifesto

Kent Beck: Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
“If you have a month to plan a project in detail, spend it on four one-week iterations developing while you improve your estimates. If you have a week to plan a project, hold five one-day iterations. Feedback cycles give you information and the experience to make accurate estimates.”

Mike Beedle (RIP): Tweet
“Agile doesn’t cure INCOMPETENCE. You can coach teams to be more engaged and collaborative, but NO Agile framework, method, or mindset can save you from BLATANT FAILURE if your development team is INCOMPETENT in basic engineering practices. Technical excellence is a MUST!”

Arie van Bennekum: The Age of Agile: Transforming People
“Agile delivers better business value in an earlier stage with better intrinsic quality. On top of this, this is where the word Agile comes in explicitly; we are better able to respond to change, new insights, new opportunities and new possibilities.”

Alistair Cockburn: Heart of Agile
“Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the heart of agile.”

Ward Cunningham: Agile: 10 Years After
“You know I think that again Agile is an umbrella term, and so it certainly was created to cast over those things, we didn’t have, we had people who understood Lean, at the workshop that drafted the manifesto, but I think Lean wasn’t seen as an important movement in software at that time. As it’s become more and more of interest, it turns out that in the conversation last night was that there is actually a wide variety of Leans. And people have borrowed some things from Lean and kind of made a softer Lean that isn’t really consistent with what the I don’t want to say the true, but let’s say maybe the most productive Lean that’s been applied in the most progressive manufacturing. And even both of those sort of fit under the umbrella.”

Martin Fowler: Agile Software Guide
“Agile Development is adaptive rather than predictive; is people-oriented rather than process-oriented.”

James Grenning: Is SAFe safe for your organization? I don’t know
“I have not spent any time looking into SAFe. I cannot make an informed opinion. I would make my opinion based on the message of SAFe and how it is being adopted. Generally, I am critical of what most Agile adoptions have become, Agile in name only (AINO). AINO adoptions leave developers feeling like they are being micromanaged and pressured to do poor work.”

Jim Highsmith: Agile Today: An Interview with Jim Highsmith
“To me there are two aspects of Agility:
1. The ability to create or respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment. So it’s not just responding to change, but the ability to create change in innovative ways to challenge competitors.

2. The ability to balance flexibility and stability. A lot of people think that agility promotes sort of a lack of structure. But really, if you don’t have any structure at all you just kind of go off into chaos. So you really do need structure. The really critical management capability here is to decide how much structure you need and balancing that with the flexibility that you need to respond to the marketplace.  Traditional approaches have come down on the side of more structure, more process and more standards, and have really restricted our ability to innovate because we don’t have that flexibility, adaptability and learning ability that we need to be competitive.”

Andrew Hunt: The Failure of Agile
“The basis of an agile approach is to embrace change; to be aware of changes to the product under development, the needs and wishes of the users, the environment, the competition, the market, the technology; all of these can be volatile fountains of change. To embrace the flood of changes, agile methods advise us to “inspect and adapt.” That is, to figure out what‘s changed and adapt to it by changing our methods, refactoring our code, collaborating with our customers, and so on.”

Ron Jefferies: Developers Should Abandon Agile
“Be that as it may, I believe that developers should detach their thinking from any particular named “Agile” method. Instead, they should turn their attention and learning to ways of doing software development that will work within any of those “Agile” methods. Those development approaches, to me, involve use of practices such as, but not limited to, those of Extreme Programming. More generally, developers’ work should adhere to the foundational principles that support Agile Software Development, as we had in mind when we wrote the Manifesto.”

Jon Kern: Agile in the Context of a Holistic Approach
“Sometimes I am asked if I would go back and change the manifesto if I could. “No” is my answer. If anything, we need to strive to (re)educate folks on what we intended when we wrote the Manifesto.” 

Brian Marick: The Agile Manifesto – what it means to us today
“Of the four values, I think “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” is often used as a club to rule out discussions of processes and tools. Which is too bad. In 2001, individuals and interactions were lower in status than processes and tools. In 2015, the reverse is true – at least among the people who, because they are good at individuals and interactions, have the most sway in most organizations. But it turns out that tools and (informal, tacit) processes are really important.”

Robert C. Martin: Uncle Bob Martin: The Agile Manifesto, 15 years later
“Think of the Manifesto as a call to action in a point of time, and not a script of how to behave. It was a moment, not an era.”

Steve Mellor: A Personal Reflection on Agile Ten Years On
“We rarely see the words “agile” and “model” in the same sentence, but they are not at all in conflict. Rather, modelers can learn a lot from the agile folk (building tests for models early, for example) and those following an agile process can benefit from the increased productivity and eased customer communication that come from sharing executable diagrams with their pair-modeling customers. Surely that’s a win for everyone.”

Ken Schwaber: Agile
“I am returning from the Agile Alliance conference. I thought I would share the answer to several questions that I was asked in my session:

1. What is “Agile”
Any software activity that conforms or attempts to conform to the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development.

2. If you could add another value to the Agile Manifesto, could you state it?
We value practices, tools, consulting, coaching, and software organizational work that continuously improve their adherence to the Agile Manifesto.
OVER
Tools, products, methodologies, processes, practices that only use the word Agile to market themselves to make money and whose correlation to the Agile Manifesto is coincidental.”

Jeff Sutherland: Agile Principles and Values
“To create high-performing teams, agile methodologies value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Practically speaking, all of the agile methodologies seek to increase communication and collaboration through frequent inspect-and-adapt cycles. However, these cycles work only when agile leaders encourage the positive conflict that is needed to build a solid foundation of truth, transparency, trust, respect, and commitment on their agile teams.”

Dave Thomas: Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)
“Here is how to do something in an agile fashion: What to do:

-Find out where you are
-Take a small step towards your goal
-Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
-Repeat.”