On one side of the spectrum there are people like Kent Beck that even after more than 10 years of TDD practice says things like           " ... given the immature state of understanding of how tests can best fit into the inner loop of coding ... Ten or twenty years from now we'll likely have a more universal theory of which tests to write, which tests not to write, and how to tell the difference." On another side of the spectrum there are some people that propose new methodologies and then mention case studies and statistics to...

What if there are claims we cannot evaluate nowadays because there is no way to prove if they are correct or not? What if is hard to distinguish between mainstream ideas that everyone like from what really work in practice?  What if orthodoxy is used as a weapon to oppose disagreement and dissent in support of someone authoritativeness? What if for some problems we have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them? What if we recognize and accept what we really known about professional software production and what we do not? ...

Here follow some contributions to the evolution and understanding of Agile values and practices from Kent Beck. Evolution of Agile Values Team vision and discipline over individuals and interactions over processes and tools Validated learning over working software over comprehensive documentation Customer discovery over customer collaboration over contract negotiation Initiating change over responding to change over following a plan You can read more about it in this Forbes article: Innovation: Applying "Inspect & Adapt" To The Agile Manifesto And you can watch this presentation: Startup Lessons Learned The 5th Agile Value ...

Test: are you an Agil-ist? Do you welcome change also when change is about changing to an Agile method other then your favorite one? Do you welcome diversity/dissent also when it's about your favorite methodology? Do you believe in collective distributed bottom-up decision making also when talks affect your idea of authority and leadership?  When discussing, is your priority to try to prove you are right? Do you believe that discussions about technical topics can be effectively decided by...

Agile Practitioner (practice) is someone who enact the values and principles of Lean and Agile Software Development and enact the practices of  many Lean and Agile methods and frameworks, based on what is best for the specific context, project, team, organization and situation. Agil-ist (ideology) is someone who without distinctions of context or situation take one side and is against the other side, without exceptions. Agil-ist can i.e. take side of  Agile against Waterfall or can take side of one favorite Lean-Agile Framework/Method against the other. Why you shouldn't be an Agil-ist (ideology)? Every value system, like the Agile's ones, are inevitably...

Everybody has an intuitive understanding of what Respect is. And Respect is also one of the core values of eXtreme Programming. I want to look deeper at what Respect means, be able to spot a disrespectful behavior and avoid it. There are many writings about Respect from many different fields (i.e. philosophy and psychology) and Respect itself has many dimensions, i.e. cognitive dimensions (beliefs, acknowledgments, judgments, deliberations, commitments) affective dimensions (emotions, feelings, ways of experiencing things) conative dimensions (motivations,...