Joy of Agility by Joshua Kerievsky is a compelling and comprehensive exploration of agility, rooted in practical insights drawn from decades of experience. While the book applies broadly to various industries and teams, it speaks directly to technical professionals, particularly those in software development, IT operations, and other engineering fields, who strive to navigate and thrive in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment. Kerievsky, an experienced agile coach and founder of Industrial Logic, distills the principles of agility into actionable strategies that help teams become more responsive, innovative, and successful.
At its core, Joy of Agility is a philosophical treatise on the essence of agility, with a focus on continuous improvement, simplicity, and rapid adaptation. It avoids the dogmatic rules of popular agile frameworks like Scrum and SAFe. Instead, it encourages organizations to cultivate agility as a mindset and practice, moving beyond rigid systems and toward a culture of learning, improvement, and innovation.
The book breaks down agility into six key qualities:
These qualities form the pillars of agile thinking, and Kerievsky explains them through real-world examples, mostly in the context of software development but also in other domains like education and health. The principles discussed in the book offer a flexible, open-ended approach to agility, and are applicable across technical domains and team structures.
Kerievsky starts with the importance of speed—speed not just in terms of delivery, but in decision-making, feedback, and learning. For technical teams, agility means more than rapid execution. It’s about shortening the cycle time between writing code, getting it into production, and learning from the results. This chapter emphasizes the importance of tight feedback loops, such as continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), that help teams deliver value swiftly and respond to change quickly.
Key takeaways include:
For technical teams, this section resonates with the need for automated pipelines, the minimization of hand-offs, and effective use of version control systems like Git.
Excellence is closely tied to craftsmanship and quality. Kerievsky points out that speed is only useful when combined with excellence—delivering poor-quality work quickly can lead to greater problems down the line. For developers, this means focusing on clean code, automated testing, and refactoring as essential practices that enable agility.
Key takeaways:
In the context of agile software development, being excellent is about creating high-quality work that doesn’t just meet the immediate needs but can also be evolved and extended over time without becoming brittle or difficult to maintain.
Kerievsky describes resourcefulness as the ability to find clever, efficient ways to overcome challenges, even when resources are limited. For technical teams, this involves being creative with existing tools, finding innovative solutions to problems, and maximizing the impact of each team member.
Key takeaways:
In the technical realm, being resourceful is about using the right mix of tools, processes, and skills to solve problems efficiently. It’s about reducing waste and finding smarter, faster ways to achieve objectives.
Agility is about finding balance—not just in workload and life, but also in the approach to problem-solving. In technical projects, balance refers to maintaining equilibrium between speed and quality, innovation and stability, and individual productivity versus team collaboration.
Key takeaways:
Balance also applies to decision-making. Agile teams need to find the right level of stakeholder involvement, balancing speed of execution with the need for broad input. For technical teams, this can mean using decision-making frameworks like RACI or DACI to ensure clear ownership of tasks and prevent bottlenecks.
Curiosity is at the heart of innovation and continuous improvement. For technical professionals, curiosity drives experimentation, learning, and growth. Kerievsky explains how fostering a culture of curiosity can lead to better solutions, continuous learning, and ultimately, a more agile organization.
Key takeaways:
Curiosity in a technical team also means investing time in learning about adjacent disciplines, whether it’s UX design, infrastructure automation, or cloud security. Teams that encourage cross-discipline learning are better equipped to handle complex challenges.
The final quality, resilience, refers to the ability to recover from setbacks and continue to push forward despite difficulties. For software teams, resilience is key to maintaining high performance in the face of failure, changing requirements, or unforeseen obstacles.
Key takeaways:
For software teams, building resilience means embracing failure as part of the process, leveraging techniques like chaos engineering to ensure systems can recover gracefully from unexpected issues, and practicing blameless post-mortems after incidents.
Joy of Agility provides a refreshing, principle-based approach to agility that moves beyond the specifics of any particular framework. For technical professionals, the book serves as both a philosophical guide and a practical handbook for fostering agility in their teams and organizations. Whether it’s through speeding up feedback loops, maintaining high standards of technical excellence, or building resilience in systems and processes, Kerievsky’s insights offer a road map for succeeding in the complex, dynamic world of modern software development.
The six qualities—speed, excellence, resourcefulness, balance, curiosity, and resilience—form the foundation of a truly agile mindset, one that thrives in uncertainty and complexity. Rather than relying on rigid methodologies or fixed processes, Joy of Agility encourages teams to develop their own practices that support continuous improvement and rapid adaptation. For technical staff, this book is an essential read for those looking to deepen their understanding of agility and enhance their ability to deliver value in today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world.