Every few years I revisit the Agile Manifesto. These visits allways lead to a deeper respect for the people who wrote it.

This week Pollyanna Pixton said that she finally got that “Agile is Learning”. Personally I think Agile WAS a “Love of Learning.”. Now it appears to be a “Love of selling”. We need to get back to the learning but that is a subject for another post.

The first line of the manifesto is…

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”

It is a manifesto to create a software learning community. In fact, its more than the first line of the Agile Manifesto. IT IS THE AGILE MANIFESTO. A personal commitment to continually strive for better ways to do software development. But not theory, stuff that works on the ground. Stuff that works out in the wild rather than ivory towers or theoretical landscapes.

The rest of the Agile Manifesto is actually a status report…

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

Pragmatists and experiential learners would never assume perfection or a complete solution that would never evolve. The implicit and missing words are “so far”

So far,through this work we have come to value…

As Alistair Cockburn said to me “The Manifesto is a historical document that should remain unchanged”. And I agree.

However, we can issue new status reports without rewriting the manifesto.

I have one small tweak I would make to the original manifesto. “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and then helping others do it.” After all, it would be nice if the people who taught this stuff could actually do it.

Chris Matts (Easter 2010)