Agile is one of the most misunderstood philosophies/ paradigms out there.

The word agile is so ubiquitous inside organisations these days, so many people assume they understand and embrace it when they practice the complete opposite.

The resources below are listed with the intention of getting people back to the first principles and giving you the knowledge to disregard all the noise.

Level 1 : Agile straight from the horse’s mouth

Here is the Agile Manifesto in its concise entirety:

The Agile Manifesto comes with 12 principles. Always come back to these principles. Print them out and read them periodically.

---

Level 2 : Understand all the terminology floating around

What is scrum, what is kanban? What is a kanban board and what does a scrum master do? How does it all relate to Agile?

For this section, you only need to go to one place, Gary Straughn’s Development that Pays YouTube channel. A huge collection of short videos that are so watchable and do a phenomenal job of passing over the knowledge.

These are the ones I recommend to start.

---

---

Level 3 : Recognise Agile Anti-Patterns

While people *claim* to want agility, what they *really* seem to value is the illusion of predictability that is the Waterfall. We perform estimates and treat them as promises.

The team does not want to fail fast. We want to analyse and architect every detail before we code anything, as if coding is somehow more expensive than analysis and architecture. As if we think analysis is how you learn, when it is failure that teaches the best lessons.

– Response from a Development that Pays survey

---

The biggest trap with Agile, and one that so many people find themselves in, is that their teams are performing the rituals of an agile framework but in reality it is just a veneer on top of all the old practices that the Agile movement wanted to address.

Here are is a good resource to skim read from time-to-time to keep you on track.