Traditional project management often struggles to keep pace with the dynamic needs of modern software teams, leading to delays, budget overruns, and products that miss the mark on user expectations. Rigid timelines and sequential processes in methods like Waterfall can stifle innovation and adaptability, resulting in teams bogged down by unforeseen changes or misaligned priorities.
The Agile Manifesto, crafted in 2001 by 17 software pioneers during a retreat in Snowbird, Utah, emerged as a response to these challenges. It introduced a flexible, collaborative approach to development. The 12 principles serve as a practical roadmap, guiding teams toward efficiency and value delivery rather than mere adherence to plans.
These principles aren’t just theoretical ideals; they provide actionable strategies for real-world application. While rooted in software, they extend to various project types, including web development, mobile apps, and digital transformations. Research suggests agile adoption can improve success rates, with reports indicating up to 75% project success in agile environments compared to lower rates in traditional ones, though outcomes vary by implementation.
This article explores each principle in a practical context, offering guidance on implementation. A key distinction: “doing agile” involves rituals like daily stand-ups, while “being agile” embodies the mindset of flexibility and continuous improvement.
Agile principles are practical decision rules that guide teams to deliver value in small increments, learn from feedback, and adapt plans as reality changes. Instead of prescribing a single process, they help you choose the right tradeoffs—what to ship now, what to simplify, how to collaborate, and how to keep quality high—so delivery stays aligned with real customer needs.
Quick takeaways:
If you’re looking for the source list, here are the 12 agile principles as written in the Agile Manifesto’s “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto” page.
Historically, they arose from frustrations with traditional methods like Waterfall, where projects followed a linear path—requirements gathering, design, implementation, testing, and deployment—often leading to costly revisions if issues arose late. By contrast, agile encourages ongoing feedback and adjustments, reducing risks associated with big-bang deliveries. According to industry surveys, agile projects have an 88.2% success rate, significantly higher than the 47% for Waterfall, highlighting their effectiveness in dynamic environments.
The 4 Agile Values—individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan—form the philosophical backbone, while the 12 principles provide the executional framework. Principles matter more than specific frameworks like Scrum or Kanban, as these tools are means to embody the principles, not ends in themselves. Over-reliance on frameworks without principle alignment can lead to “agile theater,” where rituals are performed without real agility.
| 1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. | 7. Working software is the primary measure of progress. |
| 2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage. | 8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. |
| 3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. | 9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. |
| 4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. | 10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential. |
| 5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. | 11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. |
| 6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. | 12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. |
For each principle below, you’ll see the same practical pattern so you can apply agile principles—not just memorize them:
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
To make a product quickly delivered to end-users. Agile teams often focus on creating a minimum viable product (MVP). An MVP only comes with enough core features and is often used by early real customers. They accordingly give development teams early feedback about the software for continuous improvements in the future.
So no matter whether your team wants to build an MVP or release improved features. The highest priority is always making your customers happy about the values they receive from software.
Studies show agile approaches can boost project success by 75.4%, with metrics like improved alignment to business needs reported by 57% of adopters. This contrasts with Waterfall’s rigidity, where changes post-planning inflate costs and timelines, leading to failure rates as high as 53%.
At Designveloper, during a mobile app project for a fintech client, we adopted early delivery by releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) after just four weeks. This allowed the client to test core features with users, resulting in a 25% increase in user retention rates post-launch and a 30% reduction in overall development time compared to initial estimates.
How it works in practice:
“Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.”
In some industries like IT, the market and customer demands are usually changing. Accordingly, a product that is developed with well-documented plans doesn’t always meet changeable needs. Therefore, agile comes into play to help resolve such a problem.
Particularly, agile processes enable product teams to respond to changing market trends, user demands, and even competitive threats with ease. Teams then can review, analyze, and add new findings when necessary to build a more satisfying and competitive product.
In practice, agile teams use backlogs to reprioritize, fostering innovation. For web and mobile apps, this means integrating new tech like AI mid-project without derailing timelines, contrasting Waterfall’s inflexibility that can lead to project abandonment, as seen in cases costing millions.
Designveloper’s hybrid agile approach in Lumin PDF allowed mid-project adjustments based on user feedback, adapting to rebranding needs without budget overruns. This flexibility improved the platform’s usability, contributing to client satisfaction and operational efficiency gains of up to 30% in similar transformations.
How it works in practice:
“Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”
Agile allows development teams to shorten the time from ideating to releasing a product. To do so, agile teams repetitively conduct, deploy, and modify a product’s functionality in short cycles instead of building the entire software. In other words, agile teams focus on creating and shipping some small parts of the software.
This property helps set agile apart from traditional approaches which come with long development phases. Further, it gives your team more avenues to continuously validate hypotheses and ideas.
Shorter timescales enhance agility, allowing teams to respond to tech trends in digital projects. Surveys indicate 39% of agile users achieve top performance rates, underscoring the edge over sequential models.
How it works in practice:
“Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”
The agile model requires frequent interactions between a client (commonly known as “a product owner”) and developers.
As small chunks of work are conducted in short-term cycles and changes can be made, the presence of business representatives is necessary. This is because a successful product needs to be examined not only from technical aspects but also from business insights.
Therefore, frequent communication between product owners and development teams prevents misunderstanding and builds transparency and trust. Also, working together throughout the project helps ensure work progress and a product’s quality.
So how can this meeting be conducted? At Designveloper, for example, our team often holds a sync-up meeting that last around 15 minutes per day to get an overview of the task status and any difficulties encountered. This helps our team quickly address any challenges hindering software development.
How it works in practice:
“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”
Agile itself has cons. Many companies, however, tackle its drawbacks and still succeed in creating the desired software by building a strong core team.
Accordingly, an agile team needs motivated individuals who have decent leadership skills and proper expertise to do jobs well. Also, team members should be given autonomy, a reliable working environment, and obviously defined responsibilities before projects start.
Support includes tools, training, and autonomy, enabling innovation in app development. Reports show 81% of agile adopters see improved team performance.
How it works in practice:
“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”
There’s a wide argument that face-to-face meetings are the best way to exchange information. Although this statement holds true to some extent, it’s not always possible for product owners and developers to meet in person. Especially today, many companies tend to use offshore outsourcing services. So most conversations now take place online (typically video conferencing).
Regardless of communication channels, the key meaning behind this principle is always motivating members to interact about software, strategies, and requirements in real-time.
How it works in practice:
“Working software is the primary measure of progress.”
There’s perfect software, as the market is always changing and customers often alter their demands. Therefore, instead of depending on detailed plans and documents to build a so-called perfect product, you should focus on a working one.
The working software doesn’t only operate on your expected platforms and devices but also meet user and business requirements. Teams often release updated features to provide customers with useful values.
How it works in practice:
“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.”
As said before, agile processes enable product teams to build and deploy new features continuously. This encourages a product’s sustainable development.
However, updating versions too often and too rapidly may exhaust team members, especially if they set too high goals. To avoid exhaustion and turnover, a cross-functional team should establish realistic expectations, learn to stay enthusiastic, and enhance work/life balance.
Designveloper’s HRM system development used sustainable sprints to digitize processes without team fatigue, enhancing morale.
How it works in practice:
“Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.”
As we’re talking about building software, its technical components and design are what you should care about. During the agile development process, frequent releases and updates are encouraged but with consideration. In other words, agile teams should attend to developing intuitive interfaces and free-bug codes to avoid unexpected troubles induced by poor technical performance.
This principle supports agility in web apps by enabling quick iterations. Agile’s quality improvements are noted by 25% of users.
How it works in practice:
“Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.”
For rapid shipping, the agile approach highlights the importance of simplifying the first version of a product.
Simplicity here means minimizing the amount of work done but still achieving the most optimal results. Like the Pareto principle, 80% of a team’s desired outcomes come from 20% of development work.
Accordingly, team members need to work on the most influential features that prioritize solving the pain points of users and reaching organizational goals. Building an entire complicated product also proves redundant during the agile development process.
How it works in practice:
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
The agile methodology is closely linked to the key principle of encouraging individuals to work together in a “flat” working environment. It’s where team members contribute opinions and then a whole team finalizes decisions rather than a managerial individual.
This concept helps boost a group’s communication and values over the software development procedure. Besides, a self-organizing team can create the best designs and functionality for a product.
How it works in practice:
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”
The agile model ties to the idea of continuous improvements. This concept is not only about the way you release new updates to reflect on the changing market and improve the software. But it also extends to development procedures and teams. In other words, your team should learn to become more productive and enhance processes.
How it works in practice:
Adopting agile principles doesn’t require a complete overhaul; start where you are, even in rigid organizations, by introducing one principle at a time to build momentum gradually. This incremental approach minimizes resistance and allows teams to experience quick wins, fostering buy-in.
A recommended sequence ensures a solid foundation before scaling. Begin with core collaboration and reflection, then add delivery rhythms, and progressively incorporate technical and autonomy elements.
To see whether agile principles are improving delivery (without turning metrics into pressure), track a small set of signals that show both speed and stability:
If you need clean definitions, you can cite DORA’s software delivery metrics and then emphasize that teams should use these signals for learning and improvement—not for ranking individuals.
Starting with Principle #4 (daily collaboration) is often recommended, as it builds team alignment and trust foundational to agility. Pairing it with #12 (retrospectives) allows quick adjustments.
Agile principles adapt well to remote teams using tools like video calls for face-to-face communication (#6) and digital boards for collaboration (#4). Frequent async updates and virtual retrospectives maintain rhythm.
Conflicts arise from hierarchical cultures clashing with agile’s autonomy (#11) and flexibility (#2), leading to resistance or diluted implementation. Address by gradual adoption, leadership buy-in, and cultural assessments.
Benefits like improved efficiency can emerge in 1-3 months with initial principles, but full gains—such as 75% higher success rates—often take 6-12 months as teams mature. Short sprints provide quick feedback, accelerating ROI.
No, agile principles emphasize individuals and interactions over processes and tools (#1 in values). While tools like Jira or Trello can support practices, they’re not mandatory—focus on mindset.
Yes, agile principles apply to non-software areas like marketing, HR, or event planning by focusing on iterative progress and feedback. Adapt sprints for tasks like campaign development, yielding flexibility and better outcomes.
Agile principles matter most when they change how teams make decisions—not when they become a set of slogans. When you apply them well, you deliver value in smaller slices, learn faster from real feedback, and keep quality strong enough to sustain speed. That’s the difference between “moving fast” for a sprint and building a product that can evolve for years.
At Designveloper, we use agile principles as the backbone of how we design, build, and iterate—from discovery and UI/UX to engineering, QA, release planning, and post-launch improvement. Our track record spans more than 100 projects in over 20 industries and more than 500,000 hours of work delivered through practical iterations that keep stakeholders aligned and outcomes visible. You can see that mindset reflected across products we’ve helped shape—like Lumin, Bonux, and Walrus Education—where progress isn’t measured by meetings, but by working increments that users can actually validate.
We’re also serious about accountability and communication—because agile principles only work when trust is real. That’s why we’re proud of our 4.9 rating across 9 verified reviews and the consistent feedback clients give us about responsiveness, clarity, and dependable delivery. If you want to apply agile principles to your next web app, mobile app, or custom software build—while still keeping timelines, budgets, and quality under control—we’re ready to help you turn the principles into a delivery system that works in the real world.
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