Introduction

Guidelines Accumulated Through Experience (GATE) was created to be a tool for software developers and software consumers to share their experiences of agile development, software development both in a broad and a narrow scope.

GATE’s goal is that through iterative development in a consensus based forum to reach a set of guiding principles, default practices and documentation for these default practices. The practices are, as with the agile development process, subject to change if the consensus of either what should be the default practice or the guiding principle also changes, in whole or in part.

This should however not require that whenever a change in the consensus occurs, that any development done under the former needs to be updated in order to benefit from the knowledge contained in GATE. Therefore all changes in GATE can be traced by the availability of historical versions of GATE in the version it had at a given date in time. Anyone reading this introduction is allowed to submit changes to GATE through the submit suggestions functionality found in each individual topic contained in GATE.

Our motivation

The agile manifesto has changed the industry in many ways, so much so that we talk about the twelve principles daily. However, the perspectives of each principle in itself is different for everyone. Things like experience, culture and education plays a big role in everyone's take on it.

We believe we can share the context that brings a deeper meaning, motivation and inspiration to principles and guidelines.

As an example – when I, having more than 20 years of experience in software engineering and leadership read about delivering software frequently I think back on all the times where the outcome of a project would have changed if we didn’t spend time on refining a specific feature or non-functional tidbit. Where we might have succeeded in a different way, a more valuable way – and still had time at some point to refine or fix that tidbit. The sentence could read so differently without that experience, to some extreme extent thinking it’s about creating versions of software frequently.

We hope to share the ideas, contexts, build upon and gather up the resources to improve the craft and industry.