The Values of Agile Project Management

Agile values are — alongside agile principles and agile practices — one building block of agile project management.

Reading the Agile Manifesto and the surrounding literature, you can arrive at the following list:

• Commitment
• Courage
• Communication
• Openness
• Respect
• Simplicity
• Feedback
• Focus

These are, however, values that would suit any methodology and should really go without saying. I have therefore put together a list of agile values that represent the real difference compared to classical systems:

These points will be examined more closely below.

A Different Understanding of Roles

The agile understanding of roles (see, for example, Scrum roles) gives the team considerable weight and leaves the selection and assignment of upcoming tasks to them. The manager is understood as a supporter of the team, no longer as a decision-maker. Customers are no longer just passive recipients of development results — they actively participate in the development process. In many cases, they also have a representative within the team.

Less Planning and Preparation

Planning activities and the creation of requirements documents consume a significant amount of effort in non-agile processes. Proponents of agile methods argue that customers often don’t know at the start of a project what they actually want. Even when you plan and compile requirements, that work will be overtaken by events during the course of the project and will need to be changed many times. Creating designs upfront is considered a waste of time because you don’t yet know what will work and what won’t.

Agile project management and agile values, by contrast, suggest interacting continuously with the customer rather than creating requirements or requirements specifications in advance. In this way, the development team gains insight into the customer’s problem and simultaneously receives timely feedback on the development results already produced. Changes to the design that become necessary due to continuous feedback are achieved through “refactoring.”

Interactive and Iterative Development

The agile approach is interactive through the strong involvement of the customer and is divided into fixed time segments (“iterations”). At the start of each iteration, a list of the desired functionality is created, from which the team selects the tasks that promise the highest business value or return on investment (ROI).

Limited, Negotiated Functionality

What is negotiated is not the deadline but the scope of functionality that can be delivered at the end of a time period. Agile developers consider it unrealistic to create an overall plan upfront that fixes both a scope of functionality and a delivery date for a finished product. Agile planning is binding only for the next time period, which typically spans a few weeks.

Quality Through Testing

Quality is achieved, in the agile methodology’s understanding, primarily through testing. Regression tests play an important role here, as they are meant to ensure that the software continuously improves. Other approaches to improved product quality — such as formal methods, reviews, or design — play virtually no role.

What Are Agile Values Worth?

More Freedom for Developers

There are many developers who are enthusiastic about the agile methodology with its principles — and especially about Scrum and Kanban. This is not least because developers want to write code, not documents. It is also generally more unpleasant to work against a plan than to be able to more or less determine yourself what you want to achieve in the next two weeks.

Limited Scalability

Granting a team greater decision-making authority can work when the overall project scope requires fewer than roughly ten people to handle it. As the project grows larger, the number of interfaces between the various team members increases sharply and you have to form clusters whose interfaces are managed by individual representatives (let’s call them “managers”). From that point on, more written documentation becomes necessary, because you can no longer assume that every team member can speak with every other team member at any time as needed. Experience shows that agile methods scale poorly.

Agile Values Well-Suited for Ongoing Development

Forgoing longer-term planning and the creation of requirements before implementation begins is most effective when systems can be developed incrementally. The agile approach is therefore well-suited to the further development of existing systems and wherever the reworking of an existing solution costs no more than collecting requirements in a functional specification upfront. One can easily imagine, however, that it would not be advisable to build a two-family house or a cathedral using this method. The same applies to systems in which not only software but also hardware development plays a role.

Time-Boxed Development Always Beneficial

Structuring development into fixed time periods is a recommended approach regardless of whether you use agile or classical methodology. The fixed rhythm provides a framework for planning, in which you must think about what new functionality you can deliver within a time block lasting a few weeks.

Regression Tests Always Helpful

Developers enjoy writing code, and writing regression tests can be a lot of fun. Regardless of the chosen methodology, it makes sense to have automated tests. Tests serve to detect errors. The probability of detection is always less than 100%. In that respect, it is often more effective to prevent an error than to have to search for it later. Focusing on error detection rather than error prevention is therefore only justifiable when the effort required to create the tests is significantly lower than the effort required for careful design.

Agile Values and the Role of Tools

In the world of agile project management, there is a whole range of Scrum software and project management tools that make life easier for developers. Complex project management software is then no longer needed. In addition to Scrum tools, aids for continuous integration also play a major role. These include build systems such as Jenkins and configuration management systems such as Git and Subversion.

Further Information

Read more about Agile vs. Waterfall and find more information about agile project management. In-depth articles: Scrum artifacts, Scrum roles, Kanban board, Scaled Agile Framework, project management tools, and agile project management software.