The founding document of the Agile movement, produced at the snowbird-meeting-2001 in February 2001. Seventeen practitioners representing lightweight development methods gathered at the Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in Utah and produced a short statement articulating shared values — what would become known as the agile-manifesto-four-values — plus a set of agile-manifesto-twelve-principles elaborating those values.
The four values
The manifesto's core is a statement of four value trade-offs, asserting that the left-hand items matter more than the right-hand items, while acknowledging value on both sides:
1. individuals-and-interactions over processes and tools 2. working-software over comprehensive documentation 3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 4. responding-to-change over following a plan
Significance
The manifesto succeeded as a unifying document precisely because it was abstract enough to accommodate diverse practices while concrete enough to stake a position against waterfall-style heavyweight methodologies. The seventeen signatories represented different traditions: extreme-programming (kent-beck, ron-jeffries, ward-cunningham, martin-fowler), scrum (ken-schwaber, jeff-sutherland, mike-beedle), crystal (alistair-cockburn), dsdm (arie-van-bennekum), Feature-Driven Development (jon-kern), adaptive-software-development (jim-highsmith), and the Pragmatic Programmers (andrew-hunt, dave-thomas).
The brevity was intentional. alistair-cockburn has described the meeting as producing a document that all present could agree with — which required keeping it short. The twelve principles, published alongside the four values on the same website (agilemanifesto.org), are more specific but still framework-agnostic.
Reception and legacy
The manifesto had no legal status, no certification, no governance mechanism. Its power was entirely cultural. Within a decade, scrum had become the dominant framework for implementing Agile values, leading to the rise of the scrum-alliance and eventually scrum-org. The manifesto was subsequently criticized — by some of its own signatories — for enabling the agile-industrial-complex: a certification-and-consulting industry that ron-jeffries and others argued had produced dark-agile, Agile in name only.
The document's website remains at agilemanifesto.org. All seventeen original signatures are listed. mike-beedle, the youngest signatory, was murdered in Chicago in 2018.
Signatories
kent-beck, mike-beedle, arie-van-bennekum, alistair-cockburn, ward-cunningham, martin-fowler, james-grenning, jim-highsmith, andrew-hunt, ron-jeffries, jon-kern, brian-marick, robert-c-martin, ken-schwaber, jeff-sutherland, dave-thomas, stephen-mellor