Optimism

At the Tuesday Club the other week there was a bit of chat about what seems to be a foundational assumption of Agile: that in fact we can successfully execute software development projects, so we should run them in a way that brings about the greatest benefit.

This in contrast to what appears to be the (undeclared) foundational assumption of many other approaches: development project are so hard that we are most likely to fail, so we'd better find a way to do that as cheaply as possible.

This carried across into a panel discussion at the recent Unicom conference, where one of the attendees came up with this summary description of Agile:

Collaborative optimism to solve the right problems (and only the right problems) in an incremental way

I quite like that "collaborative optimism" bit.