2learn

Values and principles

What it is

Agile’s four values, stated as preferences rather than absolutes: individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; responding to change over following a plan. The right-hand items are not worthless — they are worth less when they conflict with the left.

Why it matters

Read as absolutes the values produce anarchy — no documents, no plan, no contract — which is exactly how some teams read them and why “agile” has a poor reputation in parts of the industry. Read as stated, they are a tie-breaker for the common case: when the plan and the new information disagree, the information wins. They also name the cost honestly, which is the part teams skip: every one of these preferences buys flexibility with predictability.

Core ideas

Documentation still exists; it stops being the deliverable

Working software is the measure of progress, not the volume of documents. The artefact is whatever communicates: a diagram, a short spec, a test that describes the behaviour.

Instead of                        Produce
40-page requirements document     acceptance tests + a one-page summary
architecture PDF reviewed once    a short decision record kept with the code
status report per sprint          the deployed increment and its changelog

The test is whether anyone reads it twice, not whether it exists.

The iteration length is the real commitment

Short iterations are what make change affordable: a two-week cycle gives you twenty-six chances a year to be wrong cheaply. A long cycle with all the ceremonies is waterfall wearing a hat.

Plans are forecasts, and should be revised

An estimate becomes a commitment only if someone decides it does. Say which one you mean. A revised forecast is not a failure of the process; a plan that never changes is evidence that nothing is being learned.

Self-organising teams beat assigned tasks

The people closest to the work decide how to do it, within a goal. This is why the values put individuals and interactions first: the coordination happens in conversation, not in a tool’s workflow field.

Say the failure mode out loud

Agile fails by ceremony with no change: daily stand-ups that report status upward, retrospectives with no actions, estimates tracked against individuals. Every one of those is a symptom of the right-hand column winning while everyone says the left.

Practice

Audit one practice against its value

Take a practice your team runs — the stand-up, the estimate, the review — and write which value it serves and what it would look like if it stopped serving it.

Done when: you can name one practice whose output nobody consumes, and either change it or delete it.

Run a two-week iteration and measure the revision

Plan two weeks, then record every change made mid-cycle and what triggered it.

Done when: you can say how many of the changes came from learning something rather than from a missed estimate.

Common mistakes

  • Reading the values as absolutes — “no documentation” produces a team nobody can join; fix: keep the right-hand item, reduce it to what is read twice.
  • Ceremony without change — the vocabulary is adopted and the behaviour is not; fix: check each practice for the value it serves.
  • Estimates treated as commitments — the team stops reporting what they learn; fix: state which numbers are forecasts and revise them.
  • Long cycles with agile labels — change stays expensive and the values do not apply; fix: shorten the iteration before adding any ceremony.
  • Planning without the people doing the work — the plan is detached and the team disengages; fix: let the team decide how, given the goal.

Go deeper

Worked examples

Analytics cookies are set only if you allow them. Nothing is loaded, and nothing is sent, until you choose.