What is Agile?
Agile is an umbrella term for lightweight development practices such as Scrum, Kanban, XP and Lean, which are more suited to the complex work that makes up most of software development than the traditional approaches we inherited from early 20th century management theory. And the great news is that more and more they are making their way back to other work environments as their value is increasingly becoming recognised.
The Agile Manifesto was penned in 2001, and states the following:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more