Agile principles, as outlined in the Agile Manifesto, provide a foundation for agile software development projects. These principles focus on customer satisfaction, collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement. They’re not hard and fast rules — but guidelines to help you adopt an agile mindset.
In this guide, you’ll learn all about the Agile principles, why they matter, and how you can incorporate them into your development projects and workflows.
What are Agile principles?
Agile principles are a core part of the Agile Manifesto — a document first published in 2001 to help software companies develop and get products to market faster.
The 12 principles provide a foundation for Agile software development projects and guide teams in delivering value to customers, adapting to change, fostering collaboration, empowering individuals, ensuring sustainable development practices, and promoting continuous improvement.
What are Agile values?
Before expanding on the Agile principles, you need to know about the Agile values. The Agile Manifesto also outlines four core values that underpin agile software development practices:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
- Working software over comprehensive documentation.
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
- Responding to change over following a plan.
As the Manifesto states: “While there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
Why are Agile principles important?
Agile principles offer more than just a framework for software developers — they encourage a mindset that helps project managers in any field focus on continuous learning, change, and collaboration.
Here are five reasons why Agile principles are important:
- Adaptability and flexibility: Agile principles promote adaptability by welcoming changing requirements throughout the development process, which allows teams to respond effectively to evolving customer needs and market conditions.
- Customer satisfaction: The primary focus on satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software ensures that projects align with customer expectations and deliver tangible value.
- Continuous improvement: Agile principles encourage continuous reflection and adjustment, fostering a culture of learning and improvement within teams, which leads to enhanced processes and outcomes over time.
- Efficiency and collaboration: By emphasizing collaboration, self-organizing teams, and face-to-face communication, Agile principles enhance team productivity and efficiency, which fosters innovation and problem-solving.
- Quality and sustainability: Agile processes promote sustainable development practices, technical excellence, and sound design. By focusing on these aspects, teams can ensure the delivery of high-quality, maintainable software in the long run.
Research shows that businesses who adopt Agile experience:
- Increased collaboration (59%)
- Better alignment to business needs (57%)
- Better work environment (36%)
- Better quality software delivered (25%)
- Better user experience (14%)
- Better customer service (13%)
In summary, Agile principles are important because they provide a roadmap for software development that is customer-centric, adaptable, collaborative, and focused on continuous improvement, ultimately leading to successful project outcomes.
What are the 12 Agile principles?
Before you start rallying your team into adopting Agile, you need to understand the 12 core principles that form its backbone.
1. Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Agile philosophy approaches product design from the customer’s perspective rather than following the “we know what’s best” model. As an Agile team, your #1 priority should always be a satisfied customer. As the saying goes, “The customer is always right, even when they aren’t.”
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
A crucial part of Agile is embracing change and switching direction at any point if it helps your customer’s competitive advantage.
If you’re in the final stretch and there’s suddenly a request for a new feature added, what do you do? Traditional methods would argue that it’s a hard no — it’s too late in the game to go back to the drawing board. But the Agile approach urges you to say yes.
3. Deliver working versions frequently.
The Agile mindset focuses on “chunking down” projects into smaller, individual portions or sprints, and delivering a working version of the product at the end of each sprint. For example, Scrum breaks projects into multiple short sprints — fixed-length events of one month or less — each ending in a concrete deliverable and retrospective.
According to the Scrum Guide:
“Sprints enable predictability by ensuring inspection and adaptation of progress toward a Product Goal at least every calendar month.”
This means products get delivered much earlier and more frequently than in traditional methodologies. See here for an analysis of agile and scrum frameworks and for more about scrum values.
4. Bring business people and developers together.
The Agile Manifesto states that business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. It’s essential stakeholders communicate and collaborate to remove any uncertainties and ensure a successful project outcome.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals.
Agile leaders know that people will do their best work and produce quality outcomes with the right environment, support, and trust. Your projects will run faster and smoother by building the right team, equipping them with the required resources, and avoiding micromanagement.
6. Engage in face-to-face conversation.
Development teams need to have frequent in-person conversations (or even video conferencing for virtual teams) to exchange information and react to changes quickly. There’s less chance of misunderstandings when you can see facial expressions and body language. Plus, you can convey more information faster than via email or other written methods.
7. Measure progress with working versions of the final product.
Agile projects deliver progressively more detailed or advanced product versions until you hit the final deliverable that checks all the requirements boxes. Each delivered version has to stand on its own.
For example, you can deliver a car that doesn’t have a stereo system yet — but you can’t deliver only the front end of a car. For developers, that means delivering working software with every iteration — everything else is secondary.
8. Promote sustainable development.
An Agile team should keep a constant, sustainable pace throughout the project. It’s about setting a pace your team can keep up indefinitely rather than having a 60-hour work week one week and 20 hours the next.
Grant Currey from Flight Centre Travel Group explains how he wanted to bring his teams back to the basics of an Agile, “cards on the wall” mindset. By using a colorful Kanban view, everyone can track projects with cards that are “queued,” “in progress,” and “done,” and update them every morning.
9. Pay continuous attention to technical excellence and good design.
Traditional project management methods, such as Waterfall, take a sequential approach to projects with testing near the end. So, if you discover a problem, it could take forever to find the root cause — and even longer to go back and fix it.
Agile emphasizes continuous testing and monitoring so you can spot and fix issues early. It’s much better to scroll through 100 lines of code every two weeks than reviewing 10,000 lines of code for the first time at the end of the project.
10. Keep it simple.
Agile optimizes efficiency by emphasizing simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — and focuses on three things:
- Minimizing unnecessary tasks that don’t add value.
- Going with the simplest design and adding on features later.
- Looking for ways to do more with less.
11. Use self-organizing teams.
Agile managers shouldn’t need to micromanage a project team.
A survey by Monster revealed 73% of workers consider micromanagement the biggest workplace “red flag”, and 46% identify it as a reason they would leave their job.
If you empower teams to organize and manage architectures, requirements, and designs independently, you’ll find they are happier, more productive, and more reliable.
12. Regularly reflect and review.
Most Agile frameworks include a retrospective at the end of each phase or sprint. Retrospectives allow teams to review what went well and what didn’t, and discuss how to improve going forward.
This focus on continuous improvement helps your team stay adaptable and look for ways to improve their processes and work. It’s the mindset that allows you to achieve other principles, like finding simpler ways to do things and embracing change.
How to implement Agile principles with monday.com
Having identified the principles to follow, the next question is “how” to integrate them into your workflow and processes.
That’s where monday dev comes in.
Built on top of monday.com Work OS, monday dev equips product and development teams with the tools to seamlessly manage all their processes and achieve their goals faster in one easy-to-use platform. Save time with templates and a complete package of views, widgets, and dashboards designed to streamline your entire development workflow — including roadmaps, sprints, backlog, bug tracking, and retrospective elements — in one place.
Sprint management
At monday.com, we use 2-week sprints to help our teams work in short, productive bursts, but you can set up sprints to be 1–4 weeks in length — whatever suits your project and team best.
Use our Sprint planning template to plan, track, and manage your sprints from start to finish and achieve Agile principles #3, #7, #9, and #12.
Workload management
When a task suddenly takes two days instead of one or a low-priority activity skyrockets to top priority, you need to adapt without overwhelming your team. With monday dev, you can visualize and manage your team’s workload and always stay on top of projects and deadlines.
Rearrange and reassign work with a few clicks of your mouse — meeting Agile principles #2, #8, and #10.
Communication and collaboration
We like to bring up a dashboard at our team meetings — whether the daily Scrum or the retrospective. A sprint dashboard view can help keep the team focused, make sure everyone is on the same page, and highlight the key metrics you need to discuss.
By bringing everyone together (virtually or in person) as a team and focusing on what needs to be done to satisfy the customer, you can achieve Agile principles #1, #4, #5, #6, and #11. Try our high-level project plan template to quickly review what’s on track, what needs attention, and what’s coming down the line.
Time-saving automations
Automate repetitive tasks and save your team time with 150+ pre-built, customizable automations to focus on work that matters — e.g. “When status changes to completed, notify team lead.”
Use automations to simplify your workflows and meet Agile principles #5 and #10.
Seamless integrations
With monday dev, you can easily integrate with the tools you already use, including GitHub, Jira, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Slack, to develop products faster and fulfill Agile principles #1, #3, #7, #8, and #9.
Embed Agile principles in your development projects
Agile principles guide project managers and teams in delivering value to customers, adapting to change, fostering collaboration, empowering individuals, ensuring sustainable development practices, and promoting continuous improvement in their projects.
Browse our customizable software development templates to organize your projects better and embrace Agile principles for more successful project outcomes.
