I've seen a lot of discussion recently about what truly represents an agile method or not. It's being discussed in agile community discussion lists and Yahoo! groups, executives in commercially companies are discussing it, some authors like Boehm & Turner, Highsmith, Larman and others have tried to classify or identify agile methods, and most recently I've heard that analyst research firms are getting in on the act.

I'm increasingly seeing Ken Schwaber's criteria use to classify what represents an agile method used as the standard measure. As a reminder, Ken said, an agile process is

• iterative
• incremental
• self-organizing
• and emergent
• and if it is not all 4 of these then it is merely a lightweight defined process

Frankly, I think the whole debate about which processes are agile or not is somewhat pointless and particularly if this is the criteria used to determine the result. Why am I disillusioned with this? Because some of us in the agile community have lost sight of the goal. Agile for agile's own sake is pointless. The agile movement ought to be about delivering value to the wider community. So how about my criteria for whether a process represents the spirit of the agile community?...

A process is agile if it

• enables companies to easily respond to change
• delivers working code to market faster (than previously or with other methods)
• delivers high quality working code
• improves productivity
• improves customer satisfaction
• and provides an environment for a well motivated team with high job satisfaction

Before we become a community of inward focused homogenous navel gazers, let's remember the goal! Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson