A New Software Development Manifesto for Building the Right Things
One thing that distinguishes agile software development approaches from other approaches is their foundation on a set of values and principles. The foundation was originally created in February 2001 with the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, followed in 2005 by the Declaration of Interdependence, and in 2009 by the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship.
Each of these statements of values and principles was created by a group of people who were tackling the same type of problem and thought it might be interesting to see if there were any similarities between their outlooks. The seemingly inevitable outcome of each of these discussions was the conclusion that the development community was missing something and new principles were needed.
Another such meeting happened on Monday, February 11, 2013. Author and software consultant Gojko Adzic pulled together a group of people to talk about ways professionals concentrate software delivery on business outcomes, and to identify the core ideas that could be shared with delivery teams to help them focus on building the right things.
Karl Scotland, one of the attendees who described the day, said that the morning was spent with the group members describing the various techniques they use to figure out the right things to build. The techniques they described include impact mapping, feature injection, real options, hothousing, and user story mapping.
After hearing about the various techniques, the group then split up to focus on two separate discussions. One group talked about underlying principles; the other group discussed practical steps on how to get the most out of the techniques they described.
Gojko has posted a couple of blog entries capturing the main conclusions from the discussions. In his first post, he describes the underlying principles and what the ideas mean to him. Henrik Kniberg also posted a summary of these principles as well as pictures of the people involved in the discussion. In Gojko's second post, he describes the practical steps delivery teams can use to get the most out of the techniques that the group discussed.
Most of the previous efforts to establish a set of principles also resulted in the creation of a non-profit organization and/or conferences to continue the conversation of the ideas expressed in the principles. It remains to be seen if this will happen with these ideas, but the group has already set up a Google + Community to allow the conversations to continue.
