Agile Base Patterns in the Agile Canon

Agility is the capacity of an actor (organization, team, individual) to rapidly sense, adapt and create to achieve goals in a rapidly changing economic environment. When an actor follows the first three base patterns in the Agile Canon -- Measure Economic Progress, Proactively Experiment to Improve and Limit Work-in-process -- it is agile. Its pace can keep up with change. Adding a fourth -- Embrace Collective Responsibility -- provides resiliency. The fifth -- Solve Systemic Problems -- expands agility beyond the actor boundary. To assess an actor, measure its conformance to these Agile Base Patterns. Agile researchers often frame their activities against the descriptive Agile Manifesto for Software Development. This has overly constrained their impact. The prescriptive Agile Canon pattern language is an alternative that could broaden and strengthen agile understanding and application.