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Amelie Robertos
The Agile methodology is a project management approach that involves breaking the project into phases and emphasizes continuous collaboration and improvement. Teams follow a cycle of planning, executing, and evaluating.
In scrum, a product is built in a series of fixed-length iterations called sprints, giving agile teams a framework for shipping software on a regular cadence. Learn how the scrum methodology impacts traditional project management.
Kanban is a popular agile framework that requires real-time communication of team's capacity and full transparency of work. Learn how the kanban methodology for agile software development can benefit for your team.
Your guide to being a product manager or product owner for an agile team. Learn about developing roadmaps, prioritizing features, building product requirements documents, and using product analytics to make decisions.
Whereas the traditional "waterfall" approach has one discipline contribute to the project, then "throw it over the wall" to the next contributor, agile calls for collaborative cross-functional teams. Open communication, collaboration, adaptation, and trust amongst team members are at the heart of agile. Although the project lead or product owner typically prioritizes the work to be delivered, the team takes the lead on deciding how the work will get done, self-organizing around granular tasks and assignments.
Agile isn't defined by a set of ceremonies or specific development techniques. Rather, agile is a group of methodologies that demonstrate a commitment to tight feedback cycles and continuous improvement.
Teams choose agile so they can respond to changes in the marketplace or feedback from customers quickly without derailing a year's worth of plans. "Just enough" planning and shipping in small, frequent increments lets your team gather feedback on each change and integrate it into future plans at minimal cost.
An agile team unites under a shared vision, then brings it to life the way they know is best. Each team sets their own standards for quality, usability, and completeness. Their "definition of done" then informs how fast they'll churn the work out. Although it can be scary at first, company leaders find that when they put their trust in an agile team, that team feels a greater sense of ownership and rises to meet (or exceed) management's expectations.
The publication of the Agile Manifesto in 2001 marks the birth of agile as a methodology. Since then, many agile frameworks have emerged such as scrum, kanban, lean, and Extreme Programming (XP). Each embodies the core principles of frequent iteration, continuous learning, and high quality in its own way. Scrum and XP are favored by software development teams, while kanban is a darling among service-oriented teams like IT or human resources.
Today, many agile teams combine practices from a few different frameworks, spiced up with practices unique to the team. Some teams adopt some agile rituals (like regular stand-ups, retros, backlogs, etc.), while others created a new agile practice (agile marketing teams who adhere to the Agile Marketing Manifesto).
The agile teams of tomorrow will value their own effectiveness over adherence to doctrine. Openness, trust, and autonomy are emerging as the cultural currency for companies who want to attract the best people and get the most out of them. Such companies are already proving that practices can vary across teams, as long as they're guided by the right principles.
Although many of our teams organize their work in sprints, estimate in story points, and prioritize their backlogs, we're not die-hard practitioners of scrum. Or kanban. Or any other trademarked methodology. Instead, we give each team the autonomy to cherry-pick the practices that will make them most effective. And we encourage you to take a similar approach.
For example, if you're on a queue-oriented team like IT, kanban provides a solid foundation for your agile practice. But nothing should stop you from sprinkling in a few scrum practices like demo sessions with stakeholders or regular retrospectives.
The key to doing agile right is embracing a mindset of continuous improvement. Experiment with different practices and have open, honest discussions about them with your team. Keep the ones that work, and throw out the ones that don't.
Because we believe each team must forge their own path to agility, you won't find highly prescriptive information on this site. What you will find, however, is a no-nonsense guide to working iteratively, delivering value to your customers, and embracing continuous improvement. Read it, discuss it with your team, and make the changes that make sense to you.
You'll also find tutorials on pairing these practices with Jira, our project management tool for high-performing teams. Want to set up a kanban board? Get insights from your team's velocity report? It's all here in the tutorials.
Agile software development is an umbrella term for approaches to developing software that reflect the values and principles agreed upon by The Agile Alliance, a group of 17 software practitioners in 2001.[1] As documented in their Manifesto for Agile Software Development the practitioners value:[2]
The practitioners cite inspiration from new practices at the time including extreme programming, scrum, dynamic systems development method, adaptive software development and being sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes. [3]
Many software development practices emerged from the agile mindset. These agile-based practices, sometimes called Agile (with a capital A)[4] include requirements, discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/end user(s).[5][6]
Iterative and incremental software development methods can be traced back as early as 1957,[10] with evolutionary project management[11][12] and adaptive software development[13] emerging in the early 1970s.[14]
During the 1990s, a number of lightweight software development methods evolved in reaction to the prevailing heavyweight methods (often referred to collectively as waterfall) that critics described as overly regulated, planned, and micromanaged.[15] These lightweight methods included: rapid application development (RAD), from 1991;[16][17] the unified process (UP) and dynamic systems development method (DSDM), both from 1994; Scrum, from 1995; Crystal Clear and extreme programming (XP), both from 1996; and feature-driven development (FDD), from 1997. Although these all originated before the publication of the Agile Manifesto, they are now collectively referred to as agile software development methods.[3]
In 2005, a group headed by Cockburn and Highsmith wrote an addendum of project management principles, the PM Declaration of Interdependence,[21] to guide software project management according to agile software development methods.
In 2009, a group working with Martin wrote an extension of software development principles, the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto, to guide agile software development according to professional conduct and mastery.
In 2011, the Agile Alliance created the Guide to Agile Practices (renamed the Agile Glossary in 2016),[22] an evolving open-source compendium of the working definitions of agile practices, terms, and elements, along with interpretations and experience guidelines from the worldwide community of agile practitioners.
The Agile movement is not anti-methodology, in fact many of us want to restore credibility to the word methodology. We want to restore a balance. We embrace modeling, but not in order to file some diagram in a dusty corporate repository. We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes. We plan, but recognize the limits of planning in a turbulent environment. Those who would brand proponents of XP or SCRUM or any of the other Agile Methodologies as "hackers" are ignorant of both the methodologies and the original definition of the term hacker.
A key advantage of agile approaches is speed to market and risk mitigation. Smaller increments are typically released to market, reducing the time and cost risks of engineering a product that doesn't meet user requirements.
The 6th principle of the agile manifesto for software development states "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation". The manifesto, written in 2001 when video conferencing was not widely used, states this in relation to the communication of information, not necessarily that a team should be co-located.
The principle of co-location is that co-workers on the same team should be situated together to better establish the identity as a team and to improve communication.[32] This enables face-to-face interaction, ideally in front of a whiteboard, that reduces the cycle time typically taken when questions and answers are mediated through phone, persistent chat, wiki, or email.[33] With the widespread adoption of remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic and changes to tooling, more studies have been conducted[34] around co-location and distributed working which show that co-location is increasingly less relevant.
No matter which development method is followed, every team should include a customer representative (known as product owner in Scrum). This representative is agreed by stakeholders to act on their behalf and makes a personal commitment to being available for developers to answer questions throughout the iteration. At the end of each iteration, the project stakeholders together with the customer representative review progress and re-evaluate priorities with a view to optimizing the return on investment (ROI) and ensuring alignment with customer needs and company goals. The importance of stakeholder satisfaction, detailed by frequent interaction and review at the end of each phase, is why the approach is often denoted as a customer-centered methodology.[35]
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