Agile Essentials

The Three Pillars of Agility: Empiricism, Empowerment and Ownership

Beyond the frameworks, agile means exploring a complex environment through trial and error with an empowered team owning what they are doing.

There are many agile meth­ods and frame­works, but what is the essence of agili­ty? And how can one describe it with­out resort­ing to the ter­mi­nol­o­gy of Scrum & Co? At first glance, the Man­i­festo for Agile Soft­ware Devel­op­ment seems like a good start­ing point for answer­ing these ques­tions. How­ev­er, propo­si­tions like “Respond­ing to change over fol­low­ing a plan” are not very action­able dec­la­ra­tions of intent. The prin­ci­ples behind the man­i­festo are much more con­crete when they, for instance, demand to “deliv­er work­ing soft­ware fre­quent­ly, from a cou­ple of weeks to a cou­ple of months, with a pref­er­ence to the short­er timescale.” How­ev­er, in their vari­ety of cov­ered aspects, these prin­ci­ples do not pro­vide a coher­ent pic­ture of what agili­ty is about at its core.

Now, what can be con­sid­ered essen­tial for agili­ty? First, and most con­spic­u­ous­ly, because it is the antithe­sis of the pre­vail­ing plan-dri­ven ana­lyt­i­cal approach, it is undoubt­ed­ly empiri­cism: Agile…