Blog
Mert Özen's blog posts on software development, backend, frontend, and DevOps.
The Agile Manifesto: What Happened at Snowbird in 2001 and What the Four Values Really Say
The four values of the Agile Manifesto are a list of priorities, not prohibitions: the manifesto explicitly says there is value in the items on the right (process, documentation, contracts, plans) too. Using the Bookstore team, we explain what the 17 people who met at Snowbird in February 2001 were reacting to, what each value means for a developer, and why documents such as OpenAPI specs, ADRs and READMEs are still needed.
The 12 Agile Principles Through a Developer's Eyes
The 12 Agile principles fall into six themes: delivery and feedback, openness to change, collaboration, sustainable pace, technical excellence and simplicity, and self-organizing teams with reflection. We connect each principle to concrete practices such as small PRs, feature flags, CI and YAGNI, show how the principles break in a chain during two weeks of the Bookstore team, and why the unmeasured sustainable pace principle is the sneakiest trap.
Extreme Programming (XP): The Engineering Side of Agile
Extreme Programming (XP) is the side of Agile that lives inside the code: test-first, pair programming, continuous integration, small releases, refactoring and collective code ownership form a system that supports itself. Scrum doesn't define these practices, and Fowler's Flaccid Scrum warning describes exactly that gap; with real output we show a pair writing Bookstore's free shipping rule test-first and getting it onto trunk in small commits within minutes.
Agile Myths: No Documentation, No Planning and "Agile Means Scrum"
Agile has documentation, planning and architecture; it promises early feedback rather than speed, and it isn't the same as Scrum or Jira. We compare seven common myths with the text of the manifesto, summarize Fowler's Agile Industrial Complex critique, Dave Thomas's "agility" proposal and Dark Scrum, and list the symptoms of cargo cult Agile through the "transformation" of the company Bookstore belongs to.
Agile Meets Reality: Fixed-Price Contracts, Deadlines and Architecture
Agile turns the project triangle upside down: time and team are fixed, scope is the variable, and a fixed price doesn't have to mean fixed scope. Using Bookstore's B2B portal and campaign deadline, we cover Sutherland's change for free and money for nothing clauses, MoSCoW slicing that keeps Must have effort under 60 percent, and the architecture runway with early decisions on what is expensive to reverse (database, auth, multi-tenancy).
The Evolution of Agile: From the Manifesto to Modern Agile and the Scaling Debate
Since 2001 Agile has both become institutionalized and tried to return to its essence through proposals such as Heart of Agile and Modern Agile; the Agile Fluency Model offers consciously chosen zones, not a maturity ladder. We summarize SAFe, LeSS, Nexus and the Spotify model (which isn't really a framework) with their critiques, show through Bookstore's six teams why buying a framework isn't becoming Agile, and give a short self-check list.