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Values and Principles
Most agile thinking, while it has a lot of specific practices you can use, is based on values and principles.
This is good because, as Jim Highsmith says “Without concrete practices, principles are sterile; but without principles, practices have no life, no character, no heart. Great products arise from great teams — teams who are principled, who have character, who have heart, who have persistence, and who have courage.”
In fact most agile practitioners would argue that, while you can get results from doing various practices, and you may end up better than you were before, the reality is that to really make your agile implementation work, you need to apply these principles and ideas to your context.
There is a downside to this approach. A lot of the advise you will get from agile practitioners will start with “It depends …” which, if you are just starting out really is not a great deal of use. Worse some advice is so obscure as to be useless (e.g. “do whatever is right”).
But to me it is important to understand these values and principles as, as you start implementing agile practices, you will find that some things just do not work well (or at all) in your context. The way to address these issues is to go back to the original principles and use these to adapt practices to your context.
By Approach
The following pages show the values and principles each are thinks of as most important.
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