Agile Values and Principles: History, Definition, Methodologies

Lucija Bakić

February 4, 2025

A screenshot of a project management software displaying a task board aligned with Agile values and principles. The interface organizes tasks into categories such as backlog, to-do, and in-progress, promoting iterative progress and team collaboration. A sidebar on the left shows team members and schedules, supporting transparency and adaptability. The design features a modern layout with a soft red background and curved graphic elements.

Agile values and principles were created to help software development teams manage the dynamic project lifecycle.

In this article, we’ll go through a brief history of the Agile manifesto, its key values, and its most popular practical uses across project management methodologies.

Key Takeaways

  • The four agile values include a focus on: individuals and project team collaboration, incremental progress, customer collaboration, and ability to quickly respond to change.
  • The 12 Agile principles focus on flexibility, cross-team collaboration, frequent delivery, motivated teams, simplicity, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
  • Some popular Agile project management methodologies and frameworks include: Scrum, Kanban, XP Programming, Lean, and Scaled Agile Framework.

Short History of Agile Values and Principles

The Agile manifesto was drafted in 2000 by a group of software developers, which included Kent Beck, Alistair Cockburn, Arie van Bennekum, and others.

It was created to help product teams become more flexible and adapt to changing requirements in the development process.

Waterfall project management, the traditional methodology, was built on the principle of everything being done in sequence—design, development, and then testing. However, this led to changes being costly and time consuming.

The 4 Agile Values 

Agile focuses on iterative processes and client collaboration instead of rigid requirements based on comprehensive documentation. This is summarized into 4 core values:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan
A screenshot of a project management software displaying an infographic on Agile values and principles. The visual highlights four core Agile values: teamwork, software delivery, collaboration, and flexibility, each accompanied by a supporting statement from the Agile Manifesto. The design features a structured layout with a central heading and connected elements for clarity.

Let’s examine each agile value in more detail:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

This principle puts a focus on cross-functional teamwork and communication. While well-developed processes and tools are important to success, having a motivated team that works effectively is even more crucial.

This includes ensuring that your software development team has balanced workloads, knows exactly what needs to be done, who is the owner of certain initiatives, and has an open workspace to collaborate.

This is seen as the basis for achieving long-term success and customer loyalty.

2. Working software over comprehensive documentation

Comprehensive documentation has its value in product development, but it can also feel like a trap.

If a product is changing rapidly, this also means that your technical specification is constantly becoming outdated. Investing resources to keep everything in sync can be a burden on your project scope.

One of Agile’s key values is demonstrating progress through regular updates on working software and frequent feedback loops. Only the most essential information is documented to ensure that it can keep up with the pace of development.

3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

In the Agile Manifesto, a project is imagined as a constant collaboration between a customer and Agile teams.

In comparison to Waterfall, where project specification is created before design or development start, Agile projects are constantly evolving.

While contracts are still a part of Agile (naturally), this approach to software development accepts and celebrates a working relationship between all project stakeholders.

It’s seen as a a way to gather valuable feedback during the development process, and create a product that truly fits customer requirements.

4. Responding to change over following a plan

Agile frameworks follow these key principles when it comes to project planning:

  • High-level plans (for programs/projects) act as flexible guidelines that can change over time
  • Mid-level plans (for stages/releases) provide more detail but are still expected to adapt
  • Detailed sprint/iteration plans are firm commitments to achieving a specific goal, like delivering a product increment

In essence, plans in Agile practices aren’t set in stone; instead, they’re seen as a baseline which is certain to change during the development process.

The 12 Agile Principles

The 4 core values described in the Manifesto are further expanded with the 12 agile principles—we can roughly separate them into three categories (so they’re easier to learn): quality principles, collaboration principles, and development principles.

Quality Principles

Quality principles are focused on delivering a high quality product though optimizing the process, teamwork, and development practices involved in development. They include:

1. Continuous Delivery: Agile prioritizes delivering working software frequently to ensure customer satisfaction. Updates should include project progress reports that both technical teams and business stakeholders can understand.

2. Building Projects Around Motivated Individuals: Agile ensures that a software team has the support and resources needed to remain motivated. This includes recognition for work well done and growth opportunities, as well as good working conditions.

3. Technical Excellence and Good Design: Agile discourages quick fixes and instead prioritize clean code and best engineering practices. Regular refactoring and code reviews ensure software remains maintainable, scalable, and adaptable.

4. Simplicity in Work: Agile follows the Lean principle of making work efficient by focusing on the most essential, value adding, product features.

Development Principles

Development principles provide a framework for how to organize the scope and the stages of development. These include:

5. Welcoming Changing Requirements: Session with the clients are seen as an opportunity to improve the product based on feedback, rather than a setback. Plans and products are expected to evolve greatly during the development process.

6. Shorter Timescale: Agile teams deliver working software at short, regular intervals—typically within weeks. This supports the previous two principles by enabling frequent quality checks and rapid feedback loops.

7. Working Software as Progress Measure Agile prioritizes functional software and frequent releases as a key measure of progress.

8. Sustainable Development Pace: Agile teams maintain a consistent, sustainable work pace to prevent burnout and ensure long-term productivity. Correct estimation and good leadership is important for establishing a realistic and constant pace.

Collaboration Principles

Finally, collaboration principles are focused on improving how team members work with each other and their clients. The main principles include:

9. Collaboration Between Business and Development: Agile emphasises an ongoing collaboration between business stakeholders and developers.

10. Face-to-Face Communication: The Agile approach considers face-to-face communication as the most effective way to collaborate. Remote teams can use tactics such as video calling and collaboration platforms to replicate this effect.

11. Self-Organizing Teams: Agile supports a sense of ownership and accountability among team members. Employees are trusted to self-organize and make decisions which contribute to the development of a finished product.

12. Regular Team Reflection and Improvement: Agile teams conduct a sprint retrospective and project post-mortems to assess performance, identify areas for growth, and refine processes.

A screenshot of a project management software displaying an infographic on Agile values and principles. The visual presents a "Do" and "Don't" list, emphasizing best practices such as being open to changes, allowing teams to self-organize, and maintaining a steady pace, while advising against micromanagement and rigid planning. The structured layout enhances clarity and understanding of Agile methodologies.

The Benefits of Agile Project Management

According to the 14th Annual State of Agile Report, the benefits of Agile software development include:

  • Ability to manage changing priorities (70%),
  • Project visibility (65%)
  • Business/IT alignment (65%)
  • Increased delivery speed (60%)
  • Better team morale and increased team productivity (58%)

Considering Agile Manifesto values, these benefits don’t come as a surprise.

If you’re looking to implement Agile in your own workflows, here’s a quick overview of some methodologies within Agile and how they work in practice:

Common Agile Methodologies and Frameworks

You’ve likely heard of popular Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean, and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

While each methodology has its unique characteristics and practices, they all share a common goal of promoting iterative development, flexibility, and collaboration.

Different project management software solutions can help you adopt these methodologies into your workflows. Productive is an example of a solution that offers flexible project management tools for keeping your projects on track and within budget.

Support project management with Productive

Here’s a more detailed exploration of popular Agile methodologies:

Scrum

If you’re looking for a structured yet flexible Agile framework, Scrum might be the perfect fit for your agile team.

The Scrum framework facilitates collaboration and project management through well-defined roles, events, and artifacts:

  • Scrum Team: Includes the Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Agile Development Team, each with specific responsibilities to ensure smooth project execution. The average size of a scrum team is around 7 people.
  • Sprints: Time-boxed iterations that last between 2-4 weeks. A Scrum team aims to build a potentially shippable product by end of each sprint by working on product increments.
  • Collaboration: A daily stand-up or Scrum meeting, limited to 15 minutes, ensures the team stays aligned, focused, and informed about progress.

By adhering to Scrum’s principles and practices, your team can achieve increased productivity, adaptability, and customer satisfaction.

Scrum is one of the most popular Agile frameworks—the 17th State of Agile report has found that as many as 63% of Agile users use Scrum.

Kanban

Kanban, a Japanese term meaning “visual signal” or “card,” is a popular Agile methodology that helps project teams visualize work items on a board.

A screenshot of a project management software displaying a deals pipeline aligned with Agile values and principles. The interface categorizes deals into lead, prospect, and proposal stages, showing project names, financial values, and progress percentages. The structured layout promotes transparency, iterative decision-making, and efficient collaboration in Agile project management.


Productive helps visualize your sales funnel through a Kanban-like interface

A Kanban board provides an open workspace for team collaboration and visualizing project progress. This supports self-organization and continuous delivery, as teams can easily view which tasks are next to be completed and their priority levels.

The basic elements of a Kanban board include:

  • Columns: include various stages of project workflows, such as “To Do” or “In Progress”
  • Cards: cards represent work items, or tasks within a project
  • Tags: a way to categorize different work items, for ex. by priority or deadline

According to the 2022 State of Kanban report, 87% of respondents indicated that the Kanban Method was more effective than prior ways of working and managing work.

The main benefits include increased visibility, improved delivery speed, and better alignment between business objectives.

Extreme Programming (XP)

Extreme Programming (XP) is an Agile methodology that prioritizes customer satisfaction and rapid delivery. XP enables teams to:

  • Deliver frequent releases in short development cycles, typically lasting one to three weeks
  • Gather valuable user feedback and adapt quickly to changing requirements
  • Foster innovation and continuously improve the final product

XP uses specific practices such as:

  • Pair Programming: Code is written by a pair of programmers, where one is coding, and another is looking for defects, on a single workstation.
  • Acceptance tests: Developers write tests that verify that all business requirements are implemented as intended, and run them as scripts several times per day.
  • Continuous Integration: The codebase should be frequently integrated and tested automatically upon each check-in to ensure early conflict resolution.

These practices enhance code quality, facilitate early defect detection, and ensure technical excellence in the development process.

Lean

Lean, another popular Agile methodology, focuses on maximizing value by eliminating waste and improving efficiency.

The main principles of Lean include:

  • Effective prioritization of tasks and resources (through value streams)
  • Alignment with customer expectations with direct communication
  • Pull systems that initatiate work only when there’s customer demand

The Lean methodology focuses on the customer-oriented elements from the Agile Manifesto. The agile value it promotes the most is the importance of understanding customer needs and ensuring that every step in a process adds value from the customers’ perspective.

Six Sigma is a similar principle that focuses on improving business processes with statistical analysis. You can learn more in our article on Six Sigma in project management.

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is an enterprise-level approach designed to help large organizations successfully implement Agile practices across multiple teams and projects.

SAFe integrates Lean-Agile principles, emphasizing alignment, collaboration, and delivery to enable the following:

1. Coordination and synchronization among multiple development teams working towards shared objectives

2. Continuous improvement and delivery of value through incremental development cycles

3. Enhanced technical excellence and customer collaboration at scale

Another popular example is Large Scale Scrum (LeSS).

Conclusion on Agile Software Development

Keep in mind that whatever methodology you choose, Agile is best described as a state of mind, the foundational values and principles that you adopt during development.

An Agile mindset includes prioritizing collaboration, adaptability, customer satisfaction, and individual interactions. With these Agile manifesto values, a project manager can create a more flexible and efficient work environment.

Agile management methodologies such as Kanban, XP, Lean, or Scrum are simply a way with which you choose to represent these values.

Check out our article on project management process groups to learn more about the overall process.

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Lucija Bakić

Content Specialist

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