The Agile Manifesto, which we created to uncover better ways of developing software, says,

We value Working Software over Documentation

And we do. We’d much rather have actual, real live, working software then reams of documentation proclaiming all the great stuff this as-of-yet-nonexistent software is going to do at some point in the future.

However, agile is also about learning and adapting. And 10 years after it’s creation, one of the manifesto’s creators — Kent Beck — is looking at what agile means for startups. In a startup, he says, there’s actually something we value more than working software.

We value Learning over Working Software

Agile helps us develop software as efficiently as possible – we can bang out quality code really fast with it. But what good does fast or quality do if you’re building a product that nobody wants?

Startups aren’t just small versions of large organizations. They’re about learning and discovery, not execution. All we’ve got are ideas (Kent calls these “almost impossibles”). And so we take these ideas and we think about how we might measure (or validate) whether people would be willing to pay for them. We might build software in order to validate our ideas, but working software is not our goal here. Our goal is learning.

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Last week, Moss Colum and Laura Dean gave the Boston Software Craftsmanship group a sneak peak of their Agile 2010 Pairing Games as Intentional Practice session. And, as a bonus, we got to try the games out during our code kata.

I know what you’re thinking, Abby, you’re a freakin’ geek. And I’m okay with that. But it was WAY fun so I wanted to share.

I love the premise behind this. A lot of us struggle when pairing with another person, so let’s create games we can play (intentional practice) to help us get better at the parts we’re struggling with.

I think we can learn not only how to pair better, but also how to incorporate games into our work as a way to continuously improve ourselves and how we collaborate with others.

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The world, it seems, is changing. If you ask Daniel Pink, he’ll say that our "left-brained" aptitudes — logical, analytical skills, the types of things schools reward us for — are no longer sufficient if we want to remain competitive. These are, after all, the very things being automated by computers and outsourced at rates we can’t compete with if we want to pay our mortgages, or, say, eat.

If we truly want to succeed, we need to pull in those right-brained skills that our schools & employers have tried so hard to beat out of us — artistry, empathy, play, and story telling.  I love what Seth Godin says in Linchpin,

"Stop settling for what’s good enough and start creating art that matters. Stop asking what’s in it for you and start giving gifts that change people. Then, and only then, will you have achieved your potential."

I don’t know if Bill Warner was thinking of either of these people when he presented How to Build Your Startup from the Heart at MassChallenge last week, but it seems he’s found the formula and is sharing it with the startup world in the hopes it will shape our next generation of companies.

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