In February 2001, seventeen software practitioners met at a ski resort in Snowbird, Utah, to find common ground among the lightweight development methods each had been promoting. The result was the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, a deliberately short document that gave the movement its name and a shared statement of values.
The Manifesto’s core is four value statements: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools,” “Working software over comprehensive documentation,” “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation,” and “Responding to change over following a plan.” It adds a careful qualifier: “That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
A companion page lists twelve principles. Among them are an emphasis on “early and continuous delivery of valuable software,” welcoming “changing requirements, even late in development,” frequent delivery “from a couple of weeks to a couple of months,” daily collaboration between business people and developers, and the maxim that “Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.”
The signatories included Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and Jeff Sutherland, among others spanning Extreme Programming, Scrum, and related communities. Despite its brevity, the Manifesto became the reference point for the agile movement and reshaped how much of the software industry organizes its work.