agile manifesto

the cornerstone of our approach to agile software development

As craftsmen, our philosophy of software development is based on the Agile Manifesto which is defined by four value statements that focus on certain concepts without eliminating others. While there is value in the items on the right, at agileminds.org we value the concepts on the left more.

	Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
	Our software development is powered by people. We build projects around motivated individuals and place emphasis on developing software through collaboration and communication. While tools and processes are important and assist us in development, they would be useless if we did not work together effectively as a team.
	Working software over comprehensive documentation
	Given the choice, our experience shows that a customer will choose working software over design documentation. Working software is the primary measure of progress and a customer will understand the software better if she is able to use it as it evolves. We recognise that documentation has its place; however our primary goal is to create software with business value. Our approach therefore aims to produce software quickly and regularly using iterative development and incremental releases. Another purpose of documentation is to allow future software developers to understand code so that they can maintain or change it. We use refactoring and test-driven development to satisfy the need for such documentation. Refactoring keeps our code clean, simple and self-documenting. Test-driven development produces automated tests that make it easy for future software developers to understand the code.
	Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
	Having a contract with our customers is important but a contract is not a substitute for communication. We insist on working closely with our customers and we are prepared to invest the effort to determine what our customers really need.
	Responding to change over following a plan
	Priorities change for many reasons - as software is developed the understanding of the problem domain changes; the business environment changes; technologies change. Change is a reality that our software development process reflects. Using adaptive planning techniques, our project plans remain flexible and are capable of responding to change rapidly.