The Green Agile Guide

This guide helps agile teams integrate sustainability — ecological, economic, and social — directly into delivery.
It builds on proven agile practices and adds clear rules, roles, and metrics for long-term responsibility.

This framework has no affiliation with the official Scrum Guide or Scrum.org.
It extends common agile methods independently, with a specific focus on sustainability.

Foundations

The Green Agile Guide brings sustainability into the core of modern software development — not as an add-on, but as a measurable, quality-driven principle. It aligns ecological, economic, and social impact with agile delivery — in every role, artefact, and decision.

Start with the Introduction & Motivation to understand the need for sustainable agility, then clarify its Disclaimer & Scope, and explore how Sustainability & Empiricism interact at the core of the method.

Values & Principles

Two Values drive behavior in Green Agile and express what sustainability means in the context of green agile product development:

Awareness encourages teams to pause before acting, questioning assumptions and side effects.
Responsibility anchors ownership of long-term impact across decisions, iterations, and life cycles.

Roles in Green Agile

No new roles are introduced — but existing ones evolve with extended responsibilities:

The Green Agile Coach facilitates systemic change, embeds sustainability in team practices, and strengthens empiricism.
The Product Lead defines value through impact goals and steers the backlog toward sustainable outcomes.
The Engineering Team delivers high-quality increments that meet sustainability criteria — across ecological, economic, and social dimensions.

Artefacts & Sustainability Anchors

Sustainability is embedded in daily practice through three key artefacts:

Strategic Impact Planning ensures the product roadmap aligns with long-term sustainability goals, guiding investment and decision-making over time.
Sustainable Iteration Planning focuses each iteration on delivering value that lasts, balancing delivery speed with sustainability signals.
Outcome & Quality Anchoring extends the Definition of Done to make sustainability part of the quality baseline — not an afterthought.

Meetings & Events

Green Agile introduces no new meetings. Sustainability is implemented within existing Agile events, such as:

Sprint Planning / Iteration Planning
Daily Scrum / Daily Check-ins
Sprint Review / Product Review
Sprint Retrospective
Scaled ceremonies like PI Planning or Quarterly Planning

This ensures the guide remains compatible with existing setups like Scrum, SAFe, or Kanban — adoption is lightweight and fully embedded in day-to-day practice.

Evolution

The Green Agile Guide evolves iteratively.
It welcomes input from practice, research, and regulation (e.g. CSRD, ESRS, ISO standards). Organizations are encouraged to adapt the guide to their specific context — the core principles remain: empiricism, self-accountability, and value creation that lasts.