Abstract for: Understanding “Responding to change over following a plan” agile value in a system thinking perspective

The value “Responding to change over following a plan” is the core of agile approach. Although it is known that following a plan is essential, greater emphasis is placed on being flexible, requiring teams to adapt goals in response to changes. Research has investigated individual practices, not considering the interdependencies in agile development. This work aims to understand the process behind agile value “responding to change over following a plan”. The Causal Loop Diagram resulted from this work was based on interviews and documental analysis with a project agile manager addressing mainly two questions: 1. How are the goals defined and monitored in these projects? and 2. How are the goals altered during the project? Scenario1: plan is followed by product_vision and deliverables comparison.In Long-term, through roadmap updates, an in short term by sprints. Scenario2:response to change is made by clients-interaction, product backlog refinement, which can be overwhelmed by short-term demands, resulting in quality issues and demotivation. Scenario3:changes are anticipated by frequent client interactions and roadmap updates, supported by management structure that deals with quality issues, resulting in motivation increase and negative impacts mitigation. Just following agile practices is not enough to maintain the agile value analysed in this work (demonstrated by scenario2) and has led to the need of a management structure that deal with rework-bugs-debits, not compromising the focus on product development(scenario3). Otherwise planning remains important to anticipate future deliverables and detail them as they are developed (scenario1). This model can be adopted as a guide to flexible planning. It was used in theoretical reference