Manifesto for Agile Software Development

Four values and twelve principles drafted in February 2001 by seventeen consultants who disagreed about almost everything except the importance of shipping working software. The Manifesto is short, quotable and twenty-five years later still misread in every direction — as a decree rather than as the provocation it was. Its worth for product direction is precisely that: it is a snapshot of a disagreement that had to be staged because the industry had drifted into process worship. Read in the original it is more humble than its reputation — people and collaboration over tools and contracts, working software over documentation. Everything written under "agile" since is an argument with or against this short text.