Agile and XP Expert Steve Hayes, Cogent Consulting Pty Ltd

Abstract: As agile moves strongly into the software development mainstream it would be easy to believe that the choice facing developers is simply whether to be agile or not (is that ponderous?). However there is no single way to "do agile" - deciding what practices should become part of your agile play book can be a difficult and time consuming journey, and there is no single destination. Given a plethora of agile practices, how does a team (or an individual) even know where to begin? Despite their breadth, the many agile practices are characterised by consistency with some underlying values, so a team would do well to understand these values and whether they are ready to act congruently with these values. We'll begin by looking at three different versions of the agile values - the original Agile Manifesto, Brian Marick's recent revisiting in his Agile 2008 keynote presentation, and Kent Beck's values of accountability, responsibility and transparency. Once we understand the foundation values of agile development we can begin to look at how different contexts may constrain your choices of agile practices and tools, and how these choices in turn constrain your outcomes.