I may be a dreamer, but what I have described since the beginning of this process 2 1/2 years ago as NOVA Web Development's 4th and final (for me, at least) reboot is looking more and more like a dream come true. We appear to be on the verge of establishing ourselves as a legit business, since we have recently begun work for some legit customers. So now it's time to focus once again on our internal development.

Déjà vu All Over Again

Our current situation is very similar to where NOVA Web Development was in our 3rd reboot about 5 years ago, when I made a post titled Summer of Cooperation. In that post, I listed three goals which I believed we needed to meet to move forward:

1. find a way to generate a minimum monthly revenue of \$6K in order to keep the coop alive past September.
2. continue strengthening and deepening our skills as software developers, following the principles in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development toward becoming true craftspeople, taking pride in our work and using best practices in what we do.
3. educate all our members about the principles of cooperativism, in order to function better as a democratic, worker owned and operated business.

We find ourselves in a very similar situation in reboot 4 now, as we were in reboot 3 then (with hopefully a few important differences ;-) And these three goals are once again good guides for our self-development.

In this post, I want to focus only on the 2nd of these three goals. I'll address the other two in later posts.

How Agile Aligns with Who We Want to Be

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was written and signed by 17 software development practitioners calling themselves The Agile Alliance who met at a retreat in 2001 at Snowbird, Utah and released the manifesto. It consists of four values:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

and twelve principles:

1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development.
3. Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months).
4. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers.
5. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted.
6. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location).
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design.
10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly.

I want to keep this post short because I'll want all the participants in both NOVA Web Development and Jetro Web Development to read and think about it. The four agile values center on people rather than things, and they are dynamic and creative rather than rigid and authoritative. We are creating NOVA Web Development to serve both its members and its customers, and we hope that it will bring joyful activity to both. The twelve principles provide ways to do this.

How Agile Protects Us

The third agile value in particular, emphasizing customer collaboration over contract negotiation, is crucial to our success as a small worker owned business. The one thing we don't want is to end up in court over a \$25 thousand dollar contract at the end of 6 months when we find out what we thought we were supposed to deliver was not what our customer thinks they are supposed to receive. Contracts under capitalist social relations are adversarial instruments, and we don't want adversarial relationships with our customers.

The agile approach featuring an onsite customer is the antidote to this. The development process becomes a shared endeavor and works to built trust and a sense of collaboration and interdependence between the customer and the developers.

That is reason enough for us to develop agile processes, and we are now reaching the stage in our development where it is time for us to start thinking about this.

Let's get to it!

In solidarity,
Jeff Elkner
23 February 2025