Agile is a group of software development processes that promote evolutionary design with selforganizing teams. Agile development inspires adaptive planning, evolutionary development, and early delivery of value to your customers.
The word “agile” was first associated with software development back in 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was written by a group of visionary software developers and leaders. You choose to become a signatory on the Agile Manifesto website, which stamps your intention to follow the principles.
Unlike traditional development practices like Waterfall, Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Extreme Programming are focused around self-organizing, cross-discipline teams that practice continuous planning and implementation to deliver value to their customers.
The main goal of Agile development is to frequently deliver working software that gives value. Each of these methods emphasize ongoing alignment between technology and the business. Agile methodologies are considered lightweight in that they strive to impose a minimum process and overhead within the development lifecycle.
Agile methodologies are adaptive, which means they embrace and manage changes in requirements and business priorities throughout the entire development process. These changes in requirements are to be expected and welcomed. With any Agile development project, there is also a considerable emphasis on empowering teams with collaborative decision-making. In the previous chapter, I talked about how the Waterfall-based development process follows a set series of stages, which results in a “big bang” deployment of software at the end of the process.
One of the key ideas behind Agile is that instead of delivering a “big bang” at the end of the project, you deliver multiple releases of working code to your business stakeholders. This allows you to prioritize features that will deliver the most value to the business sooner, so that your organization can start to realize an early return on your investment. The number of deliveries depends on how long and complex a project is, but ideally you would deliver working software at the end of each sprint or iteration.
Agile versus Waterfall
Another good way to visualize the premise of Agile is with the above diagram . What this diagram shows is that with Agile, you deliver incrementally instead of all at once.
