“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
Emergent Architecture
Principle 11 of the twelve Principles behind the Agile Manifesto, the longer companion document to the four-value Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Both were drafted by the same seventeen signatories at The Lodge at Snowbird in Utah, February 11-13, 2001.
The principle argues against the late-1990s enterprise-software convention of producing architecture, requirements, and designs in separate upfront phases by separate teams, then handing them down to developers. Emerge is the opposite move: those artifacts come out of the team doing the build.