Introduction #
Agile development and in-house development have been talked about for quite some time now, and our company is no exception. However, unlike the traditional waterfall approach, agile development cannot be done in a one-size-fits-all way, and for that reason it has also been an area where knowledge has rarely been put into writing.
If things stay that way, knowledge becomes concentrated in a few individuals, and the organization cannot scale agile development. Experience is extremely important in agile development. It is essential to actually go through the development process, internalize it, and make it a habit. In the first place, you will not become able to do agile development just by taking a particular training course, nor will you become able to do it just by reading this guide.
Still, there is great value in learning what agile development is, learning from past agile development experiences, and building experience with those lessons in mind. Once you read this guide and put it into practice in your projects, you will find new challenges, lessons, and ideas of your own. If we can feed those back into this guide, the next people who want to try agile development will be able to stand on the shoulders of giants as they take on their projects.
In other words, this guide itself follows the agile development process: it is an effort to make it better and better as we all keep improving it together. We hope this guide will help those who are about to try agile development. Let’s apply what you learn from this guide in practice, feed back what you learned, and build something even better.
As mentioned above, agile development is not one-size-fits-all. Better development is not something defined by someone else; let’s build it together.
This guide is publicly available on GitHub, so feel free to send us a pull request with your changes. We look forward to hearing from you.
Now, let’s start by learning the concept of what agile is. (The following chapters are currently available in Japanese only.)