Software Engineering

6.2.2 
Agile manifesto
The proponents of the Agile Manifesto must have been confounded by the situa-
tion they found themselves in regarding their profession. No software development 
methodology, technique, or practice enabled them to achieve success. Therefore, 
the Agile proponents formulated a manifesto to establish a guild surrounding a set 
of principles for software development based on rapid prototyping, incremental 
product delivery, and 
absolutely no product design
. They needed to convince execu-
tives that there was a manner in which software products could be delivered that 
provided “value” to their customers. To accomplish this they devised a diversion-
ary tactic that, if accepted, would enable them to do what they have been trained to 
do—program. The Agile Manifesto is presented in 
Figure 6.4
 to provide a basis for 
discussing its merits and shallow misrepresentations.
The manifesto begins with a proclamation that the advocates of Agile Software 
Development were “uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it.” 
On the surface, this statement implies that by the mere act of developing software 
the design methods and techniques were spontaneously improving. However, the 
40-plus-year history of software development techniques has not resulted in such 
perceptiveness. The software development industry’s record of success has been 
below 30%, and since the adoption of Agile techniques, has not improved notice-
ably. Therefore, there is a lack of substantiation for this claim of recognized 
improvement in the art of software development.

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