3 Agile Values and Principles

Agile Values and Principles is the foundational set of beliefs and guidelines articulated in the Agile Manifesto that defines how agile teams prioritize their work, make decisions, and collaborate. Written in 2001 by a group of software practitioners seeking an alternative to heavyweight, document-driven development processes, the manifesto distilled agile practice into four core values and twelve supporting principles that continue to guide agile frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming across many industries beyond software.

The Four Core Values

Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools

Agile values prioritize direct communication, trust, and collaboration among people over rigid adherence to formal processes and tooling. Tools and processes are useful in supporting a team's work, but they are not treated as substitutes for the judgment, creativity, and coordination that come from people working closely together.

Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation

While documentation has value in preserving knowledge and supporting communication, agile values place greater weight on producing a functioning result that can be inspected, tested, and used, since a working outcome demonstrates progress and surfaces problems more reliably than a document describing intended behavior.

Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation

Agile values favor ongoing, cooperative engagement with the customer or end user throughout a project rather than relying solely on a fixed contract negotiated at the outset, on the premise that requirements are best refined through continuous dialogue rather than assumed to be complete and correct from the beginning.

Responding to Change over Following a Plan

Agile values treat the ability to adapt to new information as more valuable than rigid adherence to an original plan, recognizing that plans are based on the best understanding available at the time they were made and that understanding improves as work progresses.

The Twelve Principles

Customer Satisfaction and Early Delivery

The manifesto's principles emphasize satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable output, and welcoming changing requirements even late in a project, treating change as a competitive advantage for the customer rather than a disruption to be resisted.

Frequent Delivery and Collaboration

Principles call for delivering working results frequently, with a preference for shorter timescales, and for business people and developers to work together daily throughout a project, ensuring that priorities remain aligned with actual needs as work progresses.

Motivated Individuals and Face-to-Face Communication

The principles stress building projects around motivated individuals, giving them the environment and support they need, and trusting them to get the job done, while favoring face-to-face conversation as the most efficient and effective method of conveying information within a team.

Sustainable Pace and Technical Excellence

Agile principles advocate for a sustainable pace of work that teams, sponsors, and users can maintain indefinitely, alongside continuous attention to technical excellence and good design, which together enhance a team's long-term ability to adapt and deliver value.

Simplicity and Self-Organization

The principles promote simplicity — maximizing the amount of work not done — as essential, and hold that the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams empowered to make their own decisions about how to accomplish their work.

Reflection and Continuous Improvement

At regular intervals, teams are expected to reflect on how to become more effective, then tune and adjust their behavior accordingly, embedding continuous improvement as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time initiative.

Interpreting the Values and Principles

Values as Trade-offs, Not Absolutes

The manifesto explicitly states that while items on the right side of each value statement — processes, documentation, contracts, and plans — have value, the items on the left are valued more; agile practice does not eliminate documentation or planning but recalibrates their priority relative to people, working results, collaboration, and adaptability.

Application Beyond Software

Although written by software practitioners, the underlying values and principles have been adapted to marketing, product design, hardware development, and organizational management, wherever teams face uncertainty and benefit from iterative learning and close collaboration with those they serve.

Relationship to Agile Frameworks

Guiding, Not Prescribing Practice

The values and principles do not specify particular techniques, ceremonies, or roles; instead, they provide the philosophical foundation from which specific frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban derive their concrete practices, allowing different frameworks to embody the same underlying values in different structural forms.

A Standard for Evaluating Practice

Because they are broadly stated, the values and principles also serve as a benchmark against which teams can evaluate whether their actual practices — regardless of the framework name attached to them — genuinely reflect agile thinking or have drifted into procedural ritual disconnected from the values they were meant to serve.

Agile Values and Principles provide the enduring philosophical core beneath every specific agile framework, anchoring iterative, collaborative, and adaptive work in a small set of clearly stated priorities that have remained largely unchanged since their original articulation.