Agile Quotes

I need to be agile because I do all my own stunts. ~ Luke Goss

Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. ~ Adam Vardy

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a "sustainable pace"? And second, how could I successfully scale adoption of an Agile approach across an enterprise and overcome the inevitable resistance to change? ~ David J. Anderson

It's often the case that teams working in agile processes do not actually go back to improve the user interface of the software. But, as the saying goes, "it's not iterative if you only do it once." Teams need to make a commitment to continuous improvement, and that means not simply refactoring code and addressing technical debt but also reworking and improving user interfaces. Teams must embrace the concept of UX debt and make a commitment to continuous improvement of the user experience. ~ Jeff Gothelf

An enormous round egg snatching and castrating the agile sperm;
monstorous and stuffed, the queen termite reigning over the servile
males; the praying mantis and the spider, gorged on love, crushing
their partners and gobbling them up; the dog in heat running through
back alleys, leaving perverse smells in her wake; the monkey showing
herself off brazenly, sneaking away with flirtatious hypocrisy. And
the most splendid wildcats, the tigress, lioness, and panther, lie
down slavishly under the male's imperial embrace, inert, impatient,
shrewd, stupid, insensitive, lewd, fierce, and humiliated ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Innovative ideas aren't generated in structured, authoritarian environments but in an adaptive culture based on the principles of self-organization and self-discipline. ~ Jim Highsmith

Half, Not Half-Assed ~ 37 Signals

For an agile project, the ensemble includes core team members, customers, suppliers, executives, and other participants who interact with each other in various ways. It is these interactions, and the tacit and explicit information exchanges that occur within them, that project management practices need to facilitate. ~ Jim Highsmith

He laughs like, what can you do? Laughs and spreads his palms as if revealing himself, Cortez the thief, as he is and always was, the person I always knew was there but never wanted to see. I am surprised, but why am I surprised? I decided at some point that he had made my road his road, given over to me the last two months of preimpact existence, because I was on my cockamamie hero's quest and required an able and agile sidekick - I reached that conclusion without thinking about it much and put the question aside. But everybody does everything for a reason. That's lesson number one of police work; it's lesson number one of life. ~ Ben H. Winters

Take calculated risks. Act boldly and thoughtfully. Be an agile company. ~ Ray Kroc

Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible... it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism--exactly the same grounds, in fact--that is, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another's. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth. ~ Marilynne Robinson

An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur. ~ Leo Tolstoy

If your goal is to deliver a product that meets a known and unchanging specification, then try a repeatable process. However, if your goal is to deliver a valuable product to a customer within some targeted boundaries, when change and deadlines are significant factors, then reliable Agile processes work better. ~ Jim Highsmith

Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough. ~ Bill Bryson

Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, literally, responsibility. When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them, we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices. ~ Julia Cameron

Accountability means to say what you do, do what you say. ~ Pearl Zhu

I think the average Jew is probably sharper intellectually than the average gentile, because for years and years he's had to live by his wits. Consequently, there has evolved a race of Jews who are more agile mentally than the rest of us. ~ George Lincoln Rockwell

With agile retrospectives the team drives their own actions! ~ Ben Linders

Change is not for its own sake, it's the means to the end, not the end. ~ Pearl Zhu

Agile processes guarantee change and your ability to make these changes depends on your application's design. ~ Sandi Metz

Outcomes indicators include product vision, business objectives, and capabilities (high-level product functionality), not detail requirements. These outcome characteristics define a releasable product and quality objectives define a reliable and adaptable (works today, easy to enhance) product. These are the critical value traits, then teams need to strive to meet constraints - scope, schedule, and cost - but as secondary in importance to the value components. In many, if not most, agile projects schedule becomes the most critical constraint and is timeboxed (fixed) and scope varies. ~ Jim Highsmith

But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them - if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line - well, you're deluding yourself. For one thing, it's easier to plan derivative work - things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. ~ Ed Catmull

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes! ~ Salvador Dali

A job interview is a two-way communication to probe for cultural and team fit. No matter which side of the table you sit, you should be asking questions that are important to you without fear. ~ Salil Jha

Focusing on skills, communications, and community allows the project to be more effective and more agile than focusing on processes and plans. ~ Alistair Cockburn

The key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves ... It works in software, and it turns out that it works with kids. ~ Bruce Feiler

Doing Agile is just a first step; being agile needs to have a totally different mindset, and multidimensional perspectives. ~ Pearl Zhu

At a label, you are confined to the team you have, but I did all my solo work myself, and that makes you more agile and able to go into weirder corners. ~ Dawn Angelique

The sword doesn't change. So you have to adapt to the sword. You can't change your surroundings. They only change once you have changed. ~ Bjørn Aris

Then Dantes rose more agile and light than the kid among the myrtles and shrubs of these wild rocks, took his gun in one hand, his pickaxe in the other, and hastened towards the rock on which the marks he had noted terminated. "And now," he exclaimed, remembering the tale of the Arabian fisherman, which Faria had related to him, "now, open sesame! ~ Alexandre Dumas

If you don't collect any metrics, you're flying blind. If you collect and focus on too many, they may be obstructing your field of view. ~ Scott M. Graffius

Most literature on the subject of agile methodology... is written from the viewpoint of software developers and programmers, and tends to place its main emphasis on programming techniques and agile project management - testing is usually only mentioned in the guise of unit testing and its associated tools. ...However, unit tests alone are not sufficient and broader-based testing is critical to the success of agile development processes. ~ Tilo Linz

Flowering. Love cannot be held long within categories, likewise the poetry celebrating love. You might say that love loves confusion and not be far wrong. Love is metamorphosis, rapid and radical, agile, full of vigor and levity. Love ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Ah, to be young and agile again,' said Primrose.
'We were never that young,' replied Rue.
'More to the point, we were never that agile,' said Prim with a soft smile. ~ Gail Carriger

To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible. ~ Bertrand Meyer

The LSP makes clear that in OOD the ISA relationship pertains to behavior. Not intrinsic private behavior, but extrinsic public behavior; behavior that clients depend upon. ~ Robert C. Martin

If the discipline of requirements specification has taught us anything, it is that well-specified requirements are as formal as code and can act as executable tests of that code! ~ Robert C. Martin

Before starting a retrospective, you need to think about which exercises would be most suitable. ~ Ben Linders

USE EMOTIONS AS INFORMATION. Horses use emotion as information to engage surprisingly agile responses to environmental stimuli and relationship challenges:

(a) Feel the emotion in its purest form
(b) Get the message behind the emotion
(c) Change something in response to the message
(d) Go back to grazing. In other words, let the emotion go, and either get back on task or relax, so you can enjoy life fully. Horses don't hang on to the story, endlessly ruminating over the details of uncomfortable situations

-- from an October 30, 2013 article on the Intelligent Optimist magazine ~ Linda Kohanov

The main dysfunctions of agile team are absence of trust, inattention to results, lack of commitment, ~ Thiyagarajan Perumal

Embrace change and practice flexibility. It will make you more agile in adapting to new people and situations. ~ Susan C. Young

The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day. ~ Jim Highsmith

The beauty of agile comes in with its incremental nature and use of empiricism to focus on three "I"s - Interaction, Iteration, and Improvement. ~ Pearl Zhu

Agile is not just a methodology, but a set of principles and philosophy. ~ Pearl Zhu

To slip beneath the surface and soar along the silent bottom of the sea agile and shining in water honeycombed with light. ~ Ellen Meloy

Today, companies have to radically revolutionize themselves every few years just to stay relevant. That's because technology and the Internet have transformed the business landscape forever. The fast-paced digital age has accelerated the need for companies to become agile. ~ Nolan Bushnell

Large portions of the productivity gains from agile methods come not from doing things better, but from not doing them at all. ~ Jim Highsmith

NIKE is focused on elevating and accelerating innovation in our products, services and our digital ecosystem. This requires progressive and agile technology solutions that keep pace with our growth, which is what Juniper's solutions offer. ~ Anthony Watson

Agile and DevOps are for harnessing integration, interaction, and innovation. ~ Pearl Zhu

A value-added step in a process is defined by three characteristics. First, the step must be something that the customer is willing to pay for. Second, the step must directly change the form, fit, or function of something to produce a product or service. The final characteristic of a value-added step is that it is so important that it must be done right every time to successfully produce the intended product or service. ~ Robert E. Hamm Jr.

Elves are like trees, grounded and focused from the trunk down but graceful and agile on top. ~ Orlando Bloom

Of course. Women are agile and fast." Poppy smiled ruefully. "Not enough to elude you, it seems."
- Harry & Poppy ~ Lisa Kleypas

Cobb was in a Klan group back in the 60's, and told me stories about how they used to throw live 'coons, possums, porcupines, or ganders into Black houses at night in attempts to run them out of Johnston and Harnett County. Cobb said that late one night, he and three or four other local rednecks snuck up on the house of one Black family, peered through the window and saw a huge Black woman sitting in front of a TV watching Gunsmoke, with a gang of children all around her.
The window was open and Cobb threw a live possum in her lap. Cobb said she squalled about the loudest and longest he'd ever heard, and jumped about four feet up in the air. Cobb then ran and jumped into a nearby ditch to observe what would happen next, and it wasn't long before they saw the Black woman bust out of the back door and run across a cotton field with a trail of children behind. Cobb said she was as wide as three rows of cotton, but fast and agile. She outran all the young'uns. ~ Frazier Glenn Miller

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. ~ Smedley Butler

An accountability mind has learned to be agile, wise, courageous, resilient, and high-mature. ~ Pearl Zhu

His hands were the first thing she saw. Callused and blunt, they grasped the sides of the ladder as he raised himself the final few rungs. He was grinning by the time he cleared the base of the roof. "Hello, Liberty Sawyer," he said casually. She nodded in his direction, mimicking his nonchalant air. "Michael." He was about to step onto the roof when he paused to sniff the air. The expression on his face was sheer masculine satisfaction. "You are wearing my perfume." "Every day." His grin deepened. "Good." For a big man, he was surprisingly graceful as he stepped onto the roof. With an agile twist he turned and sat beside her. "I have traveled nine hundred miles to see that smile again. It was worth every step. ~ Elizabeth Camden

Photographic data ... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality. ~ Salvador Dali

I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these acquisitions; but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few. And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded their's. When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned? ~ Mary Shelley

The MVP has just those features considered sufficient for it to be of value to customers and allow for it to be shipped or sold to early adopters. Customer feedback will inform future development of the product. ~ Scott M. Graffius

The more detailed we made our plans, the longer our cycle times became ~ Donald G. Reinertsen

How often have you heard people brag about what great multi-taskers they are? Perhaps you've made the same boast yourself. You might even have heard that members of "Gen Y" are natural multi-taskers, having lived their whole lives constantly switching their attention from texting to IMing to Facebooking to watching TV - all supposedly without missing a beat. We even see training classes designed to teach managers how best to multi-task their Gen Y staff, the implication being that asking someone to focus on a single task through to completion has now become ridiculously old-fashioned for, if not downright heretical to, the new world order.

Don't believe it. ~ Michael Hannan

In the art of love," she said thoughtfully, "you are the best I've ever seen. You are stronger than others, more agile, more willing. Well have you learned my art, Siddhartha. Some day, when I am older, I wish to bear your child. And yet all this time, beloved, you have remained a Samana. Even now you do not love me; you love no one. Is it not so?" "It may be so," Siddhartha said wearily. "I am like you. You, too, do not love - how else could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people of our sort are incapable of love. The child people can love; that is their secret. ~ Hermann Hesse

In essence, Agile is a philosophy and a set of principles. ~ Pearl Zhu

Senor Sancho Panza must know that we too have enchanters here that are well disposed to us, and tell us what goes on in the world, plainly and distinctly, without subterfuge or deception; and believe me, Sancho, that agile country lass was and is Dulcinea del Toboso, who is as much enchanted as the mother that bore her; and when we least expect it, we shall see her in her own proper form, and then Sancho will be disabused of the error he is under at present. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Impossible?" she scoffed, lurching to face him. "You have servants who can pull the brains from a calf's head, but they couldn' get one little pear out of a bottle? I doubt that. Send for one of your under-butlers - just give a whistle, and - oh, I forgot. You can't whistle." She focused on him, her eyes narrowing as she stared at his mouth. "That's the sillies' thing I ever heard. Everyone can whistle. I'll teach you. Right now. Pucker your lips. Like this. Pucker…see?"
Marcus caught her in his arms as she swayed before him. Staring down at her adorably pursed lips, he felt an insistent warmth invading his heart, overflowing and spilling past its fretted barriers. God in heaven, he was tired of fighting his desire for her. It was exhausting to struggle against something so overwhelming. Like trying not to breathe.
Lillian stared at him earnestly, seeming puzzled by his refusal to comply. "No, no, not like that. Like this." The bottle dropped to the carpet. She reached up to his mouth and tried to shape his lips with her fingers. "Rest your tongue on the edge of your teeth and…it's all about the tongue, really. If you're agile with your tongue, you'll be a very, very good" - she was temporarily interrupted as he covered her mouth with a brief, ravening kiss - "whistler. My lord, I can't talk when you - " He fitted his mouth to hers again, devouring the sweet brandied taste of her. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Hugh is now playing a game on his mobile phone. His greasy fat fingers with bitten down nails surprisingly agile on the keys. The concentration on his face is admirable in a way. It was probably with a similar level of concentration that the theory of relativity was formulated. ~ Glenn Haybittle

People talk about the businesses of the future needing to be more agile and more responsive if they are to be successful. But this requires a deep change in the way organisations work. ~ Andrew Curry

I'm not getting involved in sports anymore, except on film. I'm not agile unless a camera's going. ~ Dennis Christopher

In Collegium it had been the fashion, while he had been resident there, to paint death as a grey-skinned, balding Beetle man in plain robes, perhaps with a doctor's bag but more often an artificer's toolstrip and apron, like the man who came in, at the close of the day, to put out the lamps and still the workings of the machines.
Among his own people, death was a swift insect, gleaming black, its wings a blur - too fast to be outrun and too agile to be avoided, the unplumbed void in which he swam was but the depth of a single facet of its darkly jewelled eyes. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky

Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change ... agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not a threat. ~ Jim Highsmith

An adult female orang-utan cannot defeat an adult male spotted hyena. That is the plain empirical truth. Let it become known among zoologists. Had Orange Juice been a male, had she loomed as large on the scales as she did in my heart, it might have been another matter. But portly and overfed though she was from living in the comfort of a zoo, even so she tipped the scales at barely 110 pounds. Female orang-utans are half the size of males. But it is not simply a question of weight and brute strength. Orange Juice was far from defenseless. What it comes down to is attitude and knowledge. What does a fruit eater know about killing? Where would it learn where to bite, how hard, for how long? An orang-utan may be taller, may have very strong and agile arms and long canines, but if it does not know how to use these as weapons, they are of little use. The hyena, with only its jaws, will overcome the ape because it knows what it wants and how to get it. ~ Yann Martel

when agile projects fail, it's often because of cultural and philosophical differences between waterfall and agile methodologies. ~ Andrew Stellman

We need to uncover better ways to improve and retrospectives can provide the solution. ~ Ben Linders

Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted. ~ James Baldwin

You tripped over my baggage, when it could have been easily navigated by more agile feet. ~ Fiona Helmsley

Agile Manifesto." It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology. ~ Jeff Sutherland

Arming employees with the tools, know-how, and mindset needed to successfully innovate on a continual basis will be paramount to organizational survival. ~ Kaihan Krippendorff

The first agile principle in this example is that the team must have the necessary skills to complete the project. Agile is not a silver bullet! If a team does not have the required skills, even agile cannot help it successfully complete projects. The second agile principle here is that the team must be self-organized, highly-trusted, and accountable. ~ John Stenbeck

One of the reasons to see improved productivity in Agile is because of the simplicity principle. ~ Pearl Zhu

Agile does not mean laissez-faire, flexibility and freedom are based on the well-defined principles. ~ Pearl Zhu

Agility should not be translated to sacrificing planning, management guidelines, and quality assurance. ~ Pearl Zhu

Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly. ~ Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Americanism in all its forms seemed to be trashy and wasteful and crude, even brutal. There was a metaphor ready to hand in my native Hampshire. Until some time after the war, the squirrels of England had been red. I can still vaguely remember these sweet Beatrix Potter–type creatures, smaller and prettier and more agile and lacking the rat-like features that disclose themselves when you get close to a gray squirrel. These latter riffraff, once imported from America by some kind of regrettable accident, had escaped from captivity and gradually massacred and driven out the more demure and refined English breed. It was said that the gray squirrels didn't fight fair and would with a raking motion of their back paws castrate the luckless red ones. Whatever the truth of that, the sighting of a native English squirrel was soon to be a rarity, confined to the north of Scotland and the Isle of Wight, and this seemed to be emblematic, for the anxious lower middle class, of a more general massification and de-gentrification and, well, Americanization of everything. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Agile, athletic, sleek-all these things describe my game! ~ Lance Berkman

I think a good entrepreneur has a very clear grasp of what the goal is, an unwavering sense of the goal, an utterly agile approach of getting there. ~ John Katzman

Strong executive commitment is a success factor for implementing Scrum, and management can best demonstrate their support of the transformation through their actions. ~ Scott M. Graffius

Agile is an attitude, not a technique with boundaries. An attitude has no boundaries, so we wouldn't ask 'can I use agile here', but rather 'how would I act in the agile way here?' or 'how agile can we be, here?' ~ Alistair Cockburn

Why write if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile and two-horned topics? ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

By no amount of agile exercising of a wistful imagination could my mother have been called lenient. Generous she was; indulgent never. Kind, yes, permissive, never. In her world, people she accepted paddled their own canoes, pulled their own weight, put their own shoulders to their own plows and pushed like hell. ~ Maya Angelou

Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent. ~ Scott M. Graffius

Some people revel in getting their hands dirty. These are the people that make startups grow wildly. People with hustle also tend to be much more agile - they're the water that goes around the rock. These are the people you want around when everything goes wrong. They're also the people you want beside you when everything goes right. ~ Leah Busque

Traditional waterfall methods deliver value at the end of the project, often months or years after the project begins. Agile projects can deliver value quickly and incrementally during the life of the project. Capturing value early and often can significantly improve a project's return on investment, and utilizing iterative, feature-based delivery is the cornerstone practice in making that happen. ~ Jim Highsmith

Without a good facilitator, a retrospective most likely will be a disaster. ~ Luis Goncalves

rinciples, or "rules" in complexity theory terminology, affect how tools and practices are implemented. Practices are how principles are acted out. Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor. Conversely, specific practices in the absence of guiding principles are often inappropriately used. Although the use of agile practices may vary from team to team, the principles are constant. Principles are the simple rules of complex human adaptive systems. ~ Jim Highsmith

All what is existing already existed. We are together for a while pondering in agile world. ~ Santosh Kalwar

It's not enough to be right because he [Rick Perry] is right, you got to be persuasively right, got to be intellectually agile, and I think he can do it. ~ Greg Gutfeld

The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects. ~ Jim Highsmith

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence. ~ Salil Jha

Agile DevOps Cloud computing Design thinking These practices all share a cybernetic model of control. This ~ Jeff Sussna

following one process and the development team with different process philosophies, terms and metrics. In Waterfall, once a "plan" is baked and approved, there is an expectation that the plan will be followed and delivered upon, even if the development team is using Agile to execute. Now I'm going to say it, "But that's not truly Agile," since Agile requires the plan to be flexible and consistently reprioritized and revised. We see this approach so often that we've heard many describe it as, "WaterScrumFall. " It's really business as usual ~ Anonymous