I recently finished reading a short article titled "Tools for Agility - White Paper" written by Kent Beck. I am using this blog post as a reminder to myself to revisit this article few months down the road. Kent provided a concise and to the point view of agile software development and dismissed various false notion about this practice. Here are few personal takeaways 1. Agile development seeks to increase the value of software development by an increased collaboration between customers and developers. 2. Individual and interactions are more valuable than processes and tools as processes and tools represent common situations. Tools and processes will be likely unable to adapt to any uncommon situation whereas human can. 3. With an outgrowth of Agile development, driving shorter release cycles, tools need to support frequent transition between activities. 4 Principal of flow - All other things being equal, frequent delivery of smaller batches of functionality is more valuable than infrequent hand over of larger batches of functionality. 5. In contrast to a miniature waterfall, agile development quickly integrates analysis, coding and testing and set up a quick feedback loop. 6. Transparency - Every quantitative change of an order of magnitude creates a qualitative change. Kent cited Test-Driven Development (TDD) as an metaphor where TDD encourages programmers to accept primary responsibility for the quality of their work. 7. A common activity for agile teams is toolsmithing. You can view the article in it entirety here Tools for Agility