What agile teams think of agile principles

Reviewer: Andrew Brooks

The 12 agile principles that guide agile approaches to software development were first stated in 2001. This article reports the results of two surveys designed to check on the relevance of these principles a decade later. The first survey asked respondents ( n = 326) to rate the importance of each principle and the importance of 45 software development practices. Taking into account the comments made by respondents in the first survey, the second survey revised the wording of several of the principles and asked respondents ( n = 93) for their opinions on these revisions. In the first survey, 11 of the 12 principles scored high on importance. The second survey revealed a rejection of the added emphasis on iterations in revised principles 2, 7, and 12. Some respondents had adopted Kanban, a practice that allows a feature to be started at any time there is available capacity, so the added emphasis on iterations was considered inappropriate. The replacement of the phrase "face-to-face communication" with "synchronous communication" in revised principle 6 also received negative comments. The respondents felt that face-to-face is the ideal form of communication and the original wording should stand. As the article shows in table 2, Planning Poker, Kanban, and stabilization iterations have yet to achieve the importance of the original agile practices. The results reiterate the importance of the original agile principles and draw attention to practices that could further improve agile approaches to software development. This article is strongly recommended to the software engineering community. Online Computing Reviews Service