agile

Agile is a family of iterative and incremental approaches to software development and project management that emphasizes collaboration, customer feedback, and the ability to respond to change. The term originates from the Agile Manifesto, published in 2001 by seventeen software developers who articulated four values and twelve principles intended to guide teams toward delivering valuable software quickly and sustainably.

Values: individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; responding to change over following a plan.

Principles include frequent delivery of working software, welcoming changing requirements, close cooperation between business and developers, sustainable pace, technical excellence, simplicity, self-organizing teams, and regular reflection.

Practices and frameworks: Agile is an umbrella term that encompasses several methodologies, notably Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), and Lean development.

Scrum defines roles such as Product Owner and Scrum Master and uses time-boxed sprints with planning, daily stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives. Kanban emphasizes visualizing work, limiting work in progress, and continuous flow. XP advocates practices such as test-driven development and pair programming.

Adoption and impact: Agile aims to deliver value through faster feedback and increased adaptability. It is widely adopted in software and increasingly in other domains. Successful agile work requires organizational support, experienced teams, and disciplined collaboration; misapplication or insufficient stakeholder involvement can reduce benefits. For large-scale efforts, frameworks such as SAFe or LeSS provide coordination across teams.

In practice, teams tailor agile methods to context rather than following a single template.