The 17 people who signed the Agile Manifesto brought different skills and viewpoints to their groundbreaking document. They weren't just theorists but working software professionals who had directly faced the problems they wanted to solve. Important members included Kent Beck, who created Extreme Programming (XP); Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, who created Scrum; Alistair Cockburn, who created Crystal methods; and thought leaders like Martin Fowler and "Uncle Bob" Martin. They had backgrounds in various areas like embedded systems, object-oriented programming, testing, software architecture, and methodology consulting.

What brought this varied group together was their shared frustration with heavy processes that slowed innovation and gave disappointing results. They wanted to create principles that would make software development more responsive to change, more collaborative with customers, and more focused on delivering working software that solved real problems instead of just meeting written specifications.^[1]