There is growing appreciation of the fact that agile approaches are in fact just applied common sense. Recently I have also found it striking how many agile practices (and un-agile anti-practices) can be justified by the concept of respect. Some examples:
It is disrespectful to developers to impose arbitrary estimates upon them
It is disrespectful to customers to ask them to sign off requirements which they can not possibly understand
It is disrespectful to customers and developers to pretend that a paper-based design is anything other than speculation
It is disrespectful to everyone involved to suggest that an estimate for solving a novel problem in a novel way is anything more than a guess...
It is disrespectful to everyone involved to ask them to spend time writing, reviewing and signing off a document that will never be referred to again
It is disrespectful to team members to throw them into a situation without allowing them proper preparation and training
It is disrespectful to customers to sell them a team to whom you have done the above
It is disrespectful to blame or reward individuals when the system is responsible for 95% of their performance
...and so on.
Given Agile's roots in the Toyota production System, with its twin pillars of Respect For People and Continuous Improvement, this shouldn't be surprising, but I can't help feeling that more awareness of this aspect would help reduce the amount of Cargo Cult Agile that we are seeing.
