The Human Factor

An excellent distillation of the elixir for building software effectively would be missing an essential flavor if we didn't touch on the topic of people. Even when building software as a single developer, there are always interactions with other people in the form of clients, stakeholders, and end users. Closed systems exist only in the academic world of theories and live only inside books.

Any model – technical, methodological, or psychological – has very little relationship to reality when the human and social aspects are not considered. This is ultimately the greatest strength of the 12 agile principles.

Note

Kent Beck, et al., Principles behind the Agile Manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html.

Despite the general, diffused disillusion we sense over the Agile hype, we still don't agree with what we've heard, that is "Agile is dead." Maybe it's the hype that is about to die, and that might even...