Principle 5: Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

This is the fifth of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able to follow the changing business requirements to strive for competitive advantage. The question is: is this going to work in practice or is this only based on a nice marketing and sales story.

Principle 5: Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. Motivation is such an obvious item in agile development that this is often overseen. Motivation has to be both in the field of the expertise of the developer and the developer must be motivated in applying agile methods. (more…)