(A follow-up to Part I: Why Agile?)

Agile Philosophy

The guiding principles of any Agile methodology are to focus on a small sprint’s worth of work at a time, to engage team members early, and to communicate frequently. In practical terms, this means producing artifacts rapidly so that feedback can be collected, details can be refined, and schedules can be adjusted as needed.

The process of artifact refinement occurs via team planning sessions, with the goal being to produce ever more tightly scoped documents that contain “just enough” detail. These frequent collaboration exercises seek to avoid the common pitfall of having individual team members over-engineer complex problems in isolation. As with any specification process, an Agile team must iterate on artifact refinement until a mutually agreed upon point of clarity is reached. The major benefit of Agile, however, is that by engaging the whole team early during the refinement process, the overall design literacy is increased, and decision points can typically be reached more quickly.