The Elements of Scrum

“The agile movement is not anti-methodology,” Highsmith wrote, “in fact, many of us want to restore credibility to the word methodology. We want to restore a balance. We embrace modeling, but not in order to file some diagram in a dusty corporate repository.”

Being agile is about building a flexible process that anticipates and embraces change, allowing the team to adapt to new requirements and unexpected developments. It is a by-now-familiar refrain: inspect and adapt. Notice how that mantra surfaces in every discussion of every agile value?

Agility is not about cutting corners to go faster. Anyone who has worked in a cluttered up, ill-maintained legacy code base will attest to the fact that progress comes slowly when those who went before us took shortcuts.

“We have been designing complex systems whose active components are variable and highly non-linear components called people, without characterizing these components or their effect on the system being designed,”

product owner does this by directing the team toward the most valuable work, and away from less valuable work. That is, the product owner controls the priority order of items in the team’s backlog.

Test as you go, not at the end—a bug fixed now is cheaper than one that has had a chance to propagate through a system for months. Deliver product early and often, as only by demonstrating working software to your customer can you find out what they really want.

the secret to the success of this new method lay in his use of empirical processes (inspect and adapt), rather than defined processes (plan and execute),

like having their tasks, agreements, and progress charts in plain sight at all times.

This vision encompasses who the product is being built for, why they need it, and how they will use it. It informs all of the many decisions that must be made in order to make the product a reality.