Hello, and welcome to the bottom mat skills podcast. And Mike, since I'm the CEO of
quality science and we are once again, continuing our adventure. With agile software
development. And I hope you're enjoying this series so far, and I hope that you're discovering
some of the power of agile as an approach.

And today we're going to talk about values and principles that actually build up the idea of agile
software development and. The reason this is so important is the greatest thing about agile is it
has values and principles. And the most challenging thing is it has these values and principles,
and they often get confused as methodologies and.
[00:01:00] Yeah, it gets a little bit hazy and foggy in the world of agile. And, um, I want to kind of
cut through the conversation and give you some signal through the noise and help you better
understand how these values and principles really play out. And I want to kind of share with you
some of my, my favorite ones and how I've I found them to work in real life on real projects,
building software, ambitious first-generation products.

So I really want to. Sort of give you sort of my, my lessons learned from these values and
principles as well. And just remember if you're interested in the master class, where we go much
deeper into agile, just jump over to bottom up.io, where you can find master classes on agile
design thinking and a whole bunch more.
It's all totally free. So just jump over [00:02:00] there and start up an account. All right. Let's get
back into values and principles of it, agile and you know, the funny thing. About, uh,
understanding where agile really comes from is it's pushing off against the, the old school. Uh,
the traditional way of building software, which is generally been referred to was waterfall, and it
was slow, bureaucratic, and you'd often get bogged down in.

A lot of details that actually in the end, they didn't actually turn out to be the right approach. And
so the crazy thing is, um, where agile comes from is busting all of those problems that we have
with traditional software. So let's get into it and let's have look at the world of agile as it retains
to these full.
Specific values. So here they are value. Number one that builds up. This is like first [00:03:00]
principles okay. Of agile software development. Number one is that individuals and interactions
prioritized over processes and tools. Number two working software is what we want over lots
and lots of documentation.
Number three, we always focus on customer collaboration or, you know, the partner in our
project over contracts and paperwork. And number four is responding to change rather than just
following the plan. Now I want to break each of these, but they are really brilliant because they
solve so many problems.
From the top. If you want to focus on individuals and interactions, I cannot tell you, this is the
critical thing of agile. Uh, if you've got a small autonomous team building an ambitious new
product, it is all down to the key ways that [00:04:00] a product to own a business. Alice, a
designer. Um, you know, engineers, you name it, how these people work together, not just
update on their status, but how they look at the facts, how they look at the scope.
They look at the user stories and really work through each and every detail together. So you
really want to prioritize these individuals and how they interact with each other really, really
important. The second one, working software is more important than the comprehensive
documentation. The key thing here is your North star as if you've got great working software that
you're testing with users.

That is the problem. Anything that you focus on in agile, you can always come back to
documentation. But the source of truth is working software and particularly working software.
That's being [00:05:00] tested with users. This is essential. So you don't get caught up trying to
have lots of nice documents and binders full of documents, but the software actually isn't that
good.
You switch it around and you focus on working software. Now the third one is. Really about
collaborating, not only internally, but externally with all of your stakeholders. In fact, this is one
of the most time consuming yet. It is still the, one of the most important things that you need to
do is whoever the stakeholders, whether they're internal stakeholders and or external, bring
them into the picture, make sure.
Whether it's through scrums demos or showcasing the work as you do it together, make sure

that you employ the right collaboration experiences for all stakeholders. Often a lot of
stakeholders are [00:06:00] left out of the picture. They turn up at the end. They don't like what
they see because they haven't been able.
To contribute. And lastly, responding to change. It's such a, such a fundamental idea in agile.
Um, and the reason that it's such a strong value is one of the real pitfalls of waterfall is at the
beginning of a technology and software project. Someone would write. I requirements and
specifications document.
And then he is later when the software's finally delivered. It turns out that those requirements,
uh, those, uh, functionalities were incorrect or incomplete. And so agile is about continuously
refining them. Now that can feel a little bit chaotic, that can also be a little bit stressful. And there
are ways of dealing with that.
But fundamentally it's about being adaptive to what the best product is for customers. So those
four values are at the cornerstone cornerstone [00:07:00] of how to think about agile. And if
you're thinking now, Oh, geez, Mike, but actually what do we do? I'm going to give you some of
the principles, but I promise you throughout this series, we're going to get very specific into
individual roles and tasks, but it's essential to understand these values and principles.

Okay. Let's keep going. I'm just going to give you a couple of my favorite principles. If you go to
bottom up.io, you can get the whole list of all the principles in the agile master class. But I'm just
going to give you a couple that I really like. So one of the principles by which you can start to do
and to prioritize your actions in an agile project is always satisfying customers through early and
continuous delivery of value work.
I am a big fan, as you know, by now, if you've listened to the design thinking series on the
podcast, if you've listened to any of my work on bottom, up in any of the mass classes, work
with users, the [00:08:00] true Testa. Yeah. The true judge of a good product is your ability to
satisfy the end user. So focus on that and try and do it as fast, early and continuous as possible.
This is. This takes all the risk out. This takes out all the uncertainty, because if you have good
food back from users, you'll always know where to go. Now another thing about software
projects is they can get big and overwhelming. So this second principle I really like is always
break down, work into smaller tasks.
And the user story is at the very, very micro level of an agile project project. And I encourage
you really to have great epics themes and user stories when you're breaking down your work.
And if you want to know how to do that, we'll be tackling that later in this series as well. She
goes quickly to other principals that I, uh, I really do like, um, big one for me is [00:09:00]
recognizing that the best work emerges from self-organized teams.
Now this is a classic paradigm of freedom versus responsibility. So you do need people that
take a high degree of ownership in agile teams. But the message here is put people together,
empower them, let them self org...