To stay agile

When you don’t train and eat you grow fat. When you grow fat it’s hard to move fast and swiftly, to be agile. To stay lean many decide to train, but training costs effort.

You can have fun and hack around with your friends cq. colleagues (which is what “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” seems to suggest), but if you just drink beer and have fun, responding to change will someday become hard. You run fat, how agile your weekends of hacking may seem.

The end-goal of agile software development is continuous and fast delivery of better software, no matter how you’d like to define that. But to stay agile requires training. Not only adding features (consuming feature-stories) but also continuously sharpening the tools that support the process, automate the process. Developing software that supports it to such extent that the process becomes a no-brainer. Hence, proper tooling over (manual) processes: automated tests, dev-ops, continuous integration etc. can replace the hard to remember and follow processes.

But do reflect. Like humans do. Individuals and interactions first. You can also decide to simply eat less.

CC0 licensed photo by Matthew Henry found on Burst