What Agility Really Means

  • What to Do
    1. Find out where you are
    2. Take a small step towards your goal
    3. Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
    4. Repeat
  • How to Do It
    • When faced with two of more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier

-- from GOTO 2015 • Agile is Dead • Pragmatic Dave Thomas - YouTube and Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)

I think this can be the summary of my current understanding of Agility.

Only by taking steps as small as possible, can we embrace the changes this interesting world presents us without losing any sanity.1

And this agility thinking can absolutely be adopted to all the things we are doing at work or even in our daily life:

  1. TDD
  2. Issue Solving
  3. Feature Management
  4. Company Management
  5. Skill Learning

Also, this methodology reflects TDD perfectly:

Find out where you are
Write a failing test
Take a small step towards your goal
Fix this failing test
Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
Refactor or Start considering next test
Repeat

I first learned this idea from 99 Bottles - Sandi Metz. (You can also read my review of this book here2)