meaning of agile methodology

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• What is Agile methodology? (A beginner’ ...

What is Agile methodology? (A beginner’s guide)

Agile methodology is a project management framework that breaks projects down into several dynamic phases, commonly known as sprints. In this article, get a high-level overview of Agile project management, plus a few common frameworks to choose the right one for your team.

Scrum, Kanban, waterfall, Agile. 

Agile project management isn’t just useful for software project management—all types of teams have been successful with this dynamic methodology. If you’re looking to get started with Agile, you’ve come to the right place.

What is the Agile methodology?

Agile methodology is a project management framework that breaks projects down into several dynamic phases, commonly known as sprints. 

The Agile framework is an iterative methodology . After every sprint, teams reflect and look back to see if there was anything that could be improved so they can adjust their strategy for the next sprint.

What is the Agile Manifesto?

The Agile Manifesto is a document that focuses on four values and 12 principles for Agile software development. It was published in February 2001 by 17 software developers who needed an alternative to the more linear product development process .  

What are the 4 pillars of Agile?

As outlined in the Agile Manifesto, there are four main values of Agile project management:

Individuals over processes and tools: Agile teams value team collaboration and teamwork over working independently and doing things "by the book.”

Working software over comprehensive documentation: The software that Agile teams develop should work. Additional work, like documentation, is not as important as developing good software.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation: Customers are extremely important within the Agile methodology. Agile teams allow customers to guide where the software should go. Therefore, customer collaboration is more important than the finer details of contract negotiation.

Responding to change over following a plan: One of the major benefits of Agile project management is that it allows teams to be flexible. This framework allows for teams to quickly shift strategies and workflows without derailing an entire project.

What are the 12 Agile principles?

The four values of Agile are the pillars of Agile methodology. From those values, the team developed 12 principles. 

If the four values of Agile are the weight-bearing pillars of a house, then these 12 principles are the rooms you can build within that house. These principles can be easily adapted to fit the needs of your team. 

The 12 principles used in Agile methodology are:

Satisfy customers through early, continuous improvement and delivery. When customers receive new updates regularly, they're more likely to see the changes they want within the product. This leads to happier, more satisfied customers—and more recurring revenue.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in the project. The Agile framework is all about adaptability. In iterative processes like Agile, being inflexible causes more harm than good. 

Deliver value frequently. Similar to principle #1, delivering value to your customers or stakeholders frequently makes it less likely for them to churn. 

Break the silos of your projects. Collaboration is key in the Agile framework. The goal is for people to break out of their own individual projects and collaborate together more frequently . 

Build projects around motivated individuals. Agile works best when teams are committed and actively working to achieve a goal. 

The most effective way to communicate is face-to-face. If you’re working on a distributed team, spend time communicating in ways that involve face-to-face communication like Zoom calls. 

Working software is the primary measure of progress. The most important thing that teams should strive for with the Agile framework is the product. The goal here is to prioritize functional software over everything else.

Maintain a sustainable working pace. Some aspects of Agile can be fast-paced, but it shouldn't be so fast that team members burn out . The goal is to maintain sustainability throughout the project.

Continuous excellence enhances agility . If the team develops excellent code in one sprint, they can continue to build off of it the next. Continually creating great work allows teams to move faster in the future. 

Simplicity is essential. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution. Agile aims to not overcomplicate things and find simple answers to complex problems. 

Self-organizing teams generate the most value. Similar to principle #5, proactive teams become valuable assets to the company as they strive to deliver value.

Regularly reflect and adjust your way of work to boost effectiveness . Retrospective meetings are a common Agile practice. It's a dedicated time for teams to look back and reflect on their performance and adapt their behaviors for the future.

What are the benefits of the Agile development methodology?

You commonly find Agile project management used in application development or other types of software development. This is because software is constantly changing, and the needs of the product have to change with it. 

Because of this, linear project management methods like the waterfall model are less effective. Here are a few other reasons why teams use Agile:

Agile methods are adaptable

There's a reason why they call it the Agile methodology. One of the main benefits of using Agile processes in software development is the ability to shift strategies quickly, without disrupting the flow of a project. 

Because phases in the traditional waterfall method flow into one another, shifting strategies is challenging and can disrupt the rest of the project roadmap . Since software development is a much more adaptable field, project managing rapid changes in the traditional sense can be challenging. This is part of the reason why Agile project management is favored in software development.

Agile fosters collaborative teamwork

One of the Agile principles states that the most effective way to communicate with your team is face-to-face. Combine this with the principle that encourages teams to break project silos and you have a recipe for collaborative teamwork. 

While technology has changed since Agile’s inception and work has shifted to welcome more remote-friendly policies, the idea of working face-to-face still hasn't changed.

Agile methods focus on customer needs

One of the unique aspects of software development is that teams can focus on customer needs much more closely than other industries. With the rise of cloud-based software, teams can get feedback from their actual customers quickly. 

Since customer satisfaction is a key driver for software development, it’s easy to see why it was included in the Agile process. By collaborating with customers, Agile teams can prioritize features that focus on customer needs. When those needs change, teams can take an Agile approach and shift to a different project. 

Agile methodologies

The Agile framework is an umbrella for several different variations. Here are a few of the most common Agile methodologies. 

Kanban is a visual approach to Agile. Teams use online Kanban board tools to represent where certain tasks are in the development process. Tasks are represented by cards on a board, and stages are represented in columns. As team members work on tasks, they move cards from the backlog column to the column that represents the stage the task is in.

This method is a good way for teams to identify roadblocks and to visualize the amount of work that’s getting done. 

Scrum is a common Agile methodology for small teams and also involves sprints. The team is led by a Scrum master whose main job is to clear all obstacles for others executing the day-to-day work. 

Scrum teams meet daily to discuss active tasks, roadblocks, and anything else that may affect the development team.  

Sprint planning: This event kicks off the sprint. Sprint planning outlines what can be delivered in a sprint (and how).

Sprint retrospective : This recurring meeting acts as a sprint review—to iterate on learnings from a previous sprint that will improve and streamline the next one. 

Extreme Programming (XP)

Typically used in software development, Extreme Programming (XP) is an Agile framework that outlines values that will allow your team to work together more effectively.  

The five values of XP include:

Communication

Similar to daily Scrum standups, there are regular releases and iterations, yet XP is much more technical in its approach. If your dev team needs to quickly release and respond to customer requests, XP focuses on the “how” it will get done. 

Adaptive Project Framework (APF)

The Adaptive Project Framework, also known as Adaptive Project Management (APM) grew from the idea that unknown factors can show up at any time during a project. This technique is mainly used for IT projects where more traditional project management techniques don’t apply.

This framework is based on the idea that project resources can change at any time. For example, budgets can change, timelines can shift, or team members working on the project may transition to different teams. APF focuses on the resources that a project has, as opposed to the resources a project needs. 

Extreme Project Management (XPM)

This type of project management is often used for very complex projects with a high level of uncertainty. This approach involves constantly adapting processes until they lead to the desired result. This type of project involves many spontaneous changes and it’s normal for teams to switch strategies from one week to the next. 

XPM requires a lot of flexibility. This is one of the reasons why each sprint is short—only a few weeks maximum. This methodology allows for frequent changes, trial-and-error approaches to problems, and many iterations of self-correction.

Adaptive Software Development (ASD)

This Agile methodology enables teams to quickly adapt to changing requirements. The main focus of this process is continuous adaptation. The phases of this project type —speculate, collaborate, and learn—allow for continuous learning as the project progresses. 

It’s not uncommon for teams running ASD to be in all three phases of ASD at once. Because of its non-linear structure, it’s common for the phases to overlap. Because of the fluidity of this type of management, there’s a higher likelihood that the constant repetition of the three phases helps team members identify and solve problems much quicker than standard project management methods.

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)

The Dynamic Systems Development Method is an Agile method that focuses on a full project lifecycle. Because of this, DSDM has a more rigorous structure and foundation, unlike other Agile methods. 

There are four main phases of DSDM:

Feasibility and business study

Functional mode or prototype iteration

Design and build iteration

Implementation

Feature Driven Development (FDD)

Feature Driven Development blends different Agile best practices. While still an iterative method of project management, this model focuses more on the exact features of a software that the team is working to develop. Feature-driven development relies heavily on customer input, as the features the team prioritizes are the features that the customers need. 

This model also allows teams to update projects frequently. If there is an error, it's quick to cycle through and implement a fix as the phases of this framework are constantly moving. 

Organize Agile processes with Asana

You’ll often hear software development teams refer to the Agile process—but any team can run Agile. If you’re looking for a more flexible project management framework, try Agile. 

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What Is Agile? A Deep Dive Into Agile Methodology.

Agile Definition

Agile methodology is a defined framework for software development success. It helps teams adapt and solve specific needs at a given time and prioritizes accelerated time to market and the value of user insights. Agile is based upon a set of four values and twelve principles laid out in the Manifesto for Agile Software development.

Created with flexibility and adaptability in mind, Agile is a method of organizing software development and product management teams to prioritize the continuous development of products after they go to market. The Agile framework ensures that products are able to solve market issues as they arise and reduces the number of abandoned projects in any team’s portfolio.

Agile vs. Waterfall

Before the creation of the Agile methodology, it could take years to develop a product that solves a business’s key challenges and allows them to focus on continuous growth. The most common software development process of the pre-Agile era was known as Waterfall . Waterfall encourages development teams to identify problems, develop a solution, and bring a product to market in its entirety, providing the most robust experience at first interaction.

Waterfall Methodology

The Waterfall development methodology follows a clear path to reach its end product

• Project requirements and scope of work are set into place.
• Products are designed to meet requirements laid out by the scope.
• Products are built.
• Products are tested.
• Problems are discovered during testing and fixes are applied.
• Products are launched once testing is completed.

While the Waterfall approach led to more complete products hitting the market at a given time, it also introduced several downsides. The biggest issue was that Waterfall forced development teams to stick to the scope without introducing changes throughout the process. This meant that solutions would often no longer be viable as challenges shifted over time to newer, rapidly emerging problems. It was commonplace for development teams to rack up a “graveyard” of abandoned projects rather than bring outdated solutions to the marketplace.

See More Agile Stories Agile implementation won’t create great software on its own — but it can help.

Shift to Agile

As frustrations mounted across enterprises throughout the 1990s, the software industry became ripe for an update to how projects are built. The answer arrived in 2000 with the introduction of Agile methodology. 

Pioneered by a group of software developers in Utah, Agile emerged as a way to speed up development times to bring new software to market swiftly. These developers realized that reducing the time it takes for users to receive solutions to their problems would fix issues with market fit while also realizing that receiving rapid feedback from users would affirm work in progress and allow for constant improvement. Eventually, the developers were able to formalize the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, commonly referred to as the Agile Manifesto.

The creation of the Agile Manifesto brought about four central values and twelve principles that set the basis for Agile methodology

Agile Values

1. Individuals and interactions should be prioritized over processes and tools . The people who create the products are responsible for the success of that product.

2. Working software is more useful than comprehensive documentation . Ensuring products can reach the market in a timely manner is the priority.

3. Customer collaboration should be prioritized over contract negotiation . Customers are crucial to the development of quality products.

4. Responding to change is valued over following a plan . Agile work environments are all about adaptability and making the right decision for a given moment.

Advantages and Benefits of Agile

Adopting an Agile methodology offers teams many benefits , including preventing silos, allowing for quick changes and making space for reflection easier.

Lets Developers Take Ownership

One upside of Agile is the permission and ownership its structure grants to teams and individual developers. Since Agile relies on teams to self-organize and collaborate, it inherently promotes ownership of projects and deliverables. As products are continually developed, an individual may work on a specific product for months or even years after its release — granting a deeper sense of ownership and connection to a particular product for developers. 

Prevents Silos

The collaborative nature of Agile also prevents teams from being siloed off from one another. This allows projects to move faster and avoid unnecessary delays caused by passing aspects of a project from one team to the next. 

Allow for Quick Changes

Agile allows teams to pivot away from processes or products that aren’t working, granting permission to make quick changes to the product or the process as necessary. Pivoting in Agile can look like removing a card from a sprint or restructuring sprints to allow for shorter work cycles. The ability to pivot easily and change products throughout the development process helps teams create more innovative and in-demand products. 

Makes Space for Reflection

Many of Agile’s frameworks offer a template for how and when teams should reflect on products and projects they have completed. This allows both companies as a whole and development teams to gain insights on what worked or what didn’t from the retrospective meetings in Agile frameworks.

Agile principles

• Customer satisfaction is the top priority
• Harness change
• Deliver working software frequently
• Business-wide collaboration is a must
• Build supportive environments around motivated individuals
• Embrace face-to-face decision making
• Measure progress through working software
• Promote sustainable development
• Maintain attention to technical excellence
• Simplicity is essential
• Rely on self-organizing teams
• Regularly reflect on and adjust team efficiency

Agile relies on several specifically defined concepts to organize the development process. These processes help set clear expectations for all stakeholders and minimize potential roadblocks that could delay time to market. One of the most crucial concepts is that every Agile development process revolves around specific roles.

Agile Roles

Agile processes begin with the user or customer in mind by defining a persona to help identify their behavior, needs and how the product will assist them.

Product Owner

The main responsibility of the product owner is to be able to properly distill user insights, internal and external ideas and feedback received into a product vision. Product visions are concise, straightforward sentiments that allow the product’s desired benefit to become clear to all parties. Product owners work alongside the development teams to create user stories that provide more details on the target user, the problem at hand, the solution’s benefits, and criteria for meeting the goal.

Software Development Team

In Agile, software development teams feature diverse, multidisciplinary groups of people working together to deliver end-to-end functioning applications. Teams are often composed of developers, quality assurance engineers, designers, analysts and additional engineers who begin by building the database, business logic and user interface for demos. Agile software development teams meet frequently to ensure progress is being made and every member has a clear vision of their roles in the process.

Agile Methods and Frameworks

While Agile methodology is designed to be adaptable to a business and its market’s needs, the Scrum and Kanban frameworks help define the development process to ensure a timely launch.

Scrum Framework

Scrum is the most widely used framework within Agile and is based upon five values: commitment. courage, focus, openness and respect. Scrum maintains many of the same roles as the basic Agile framework but adds the Scrum Master, who ensures Scrum is understood and executed properly. While Agile is a mindset and method for how to approach work, Scrum is a framework for how to get the work done. 

The Scrum framework uses a backlog of products as its primary source of work that needs to be done. This list is usually determined by the product manager and often includes enhancements or fixes to already existing products. 

Scrum follows set “events” to carry out organized development. These events include:

Sprints: Sprints are timeboxes for accomplishing a goal. These remain consistent throughout the development process and their length will not exceed a single month.

Sprint Planning : Sprint planning is the collaborative process of building the upcoming Sprint with the rest of the development team.

Daily Scrum : 15-minute meetings that occur during every day of the Sprint are called daily scrums. Achievements from the previous day are noted during daily scrums and new expectations are set in place.

Sprint Review: These meetings occur at the end of every Sprint so the scrum team can present their Increment to stakeholders and receive feedback.

Sprint Retrospective : At the end of a Sprint, teams meet to discuss the previous Sprint’s achievements and fallbacks before setting expectations and improvements for the next Sprint.

Kanban Framework

Kanban is a more visual method of Agile project management that helps paint a clear picture of the workflow to identify early bottlenecks for a better result. Born out of the production lines of Toyota in the 1940s, Kanban follows six general practices: visualization, limits to work in progress, flow management, creating explicit policies, utilizing feedback loops and experimental collaboration.

Kanban’s visual methodology is built upon interactive cues that make the development process abundantly clear.

Kanban Board: A physical or software-based management tool that lays out tasks in progress, to-do lists and completed tasks.

Kanban Cards : Kanban cards occupy the Kanban board and represent the individual tasks that the team is responsible for. Information in Kanban cards will often include the task’s name, status, cycle time and deadlines.

Kanban Swimlanes : This element of the Kanban board allows team members to categorize tasks for clear indications of progress. Tasks can be shuffled upon receiving feedback to distinguish between work completed, ongoing or not yet started.

Other Agile Frameworks and Methodologies

Scrum and Kanban have long been the most popular frameworks for Agile project management but other variations exist to meet specific employee, company and market needs. 

Extreme Programming (XP)

Extreme Programming is designed to provide the development team with a higher quality of life while simultaneously improving the quality of the product. It accomplishes this by following practices that include small releases, simple design, pair programming, collective ownership, continuous integration, a coding standard, an on-site customer and a 40-hour workweek.

Crystal is a family of Agile methodologies built around the key components of teamwork, communication, simplicity and reflection. This framework is designed to be adaptable on a project-by-project basis and tailors itself based on pre-existing policies, practices and processes to meet demands.

Feature-Driven Development (FDD)

Feature-Driven Development prioritizes delivering working software swiftly more than any other framework. FDD is built upon shorter phases of work with a goal of actualizing a single feature at a time.

Lean is a methodology that focuses on creating value for the customer by ensuring a company’s people and resources are optimized. The method’ main principles are identifying value, mapping the value stream, creating flow, establishing pull and pursuing perfection.

Scrumban is exactly how it sounds, a combination of Scrum and Kanban. This method uses the structure and timeline of the Scrum with the tools of Kanban.

Agile Project Management Deliverables

While every framework varies in both process and timeliness of reporting, they all share many deliverables:  

Product Vision Statements

The long-term vision and solutions the product will provide.

Product Roadmap

A product’s vision is only as valuable as its roadmap, which identifies how and when the project will be taken from the planning stages through its development to reach the market.

Product Backlog

Keeping track of new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, infrastructure changes and all other adjustments is crucial to the continued success and development of the product.

Release Plan

Mapping out the specifics of how a product will reach the market and how users will interact with it is crucial knowledge for stakeholders.

Before a product can be released, an increment must first be created. Increments compile all changes in a backlog to create a working version to present to stakeholders for feedback. Increments can then be released, revised or presented again.

Read Next To Stay Agile, Don’t Let Your Product Team Get Trapped in a Loop

Agile is only truly effective if all team members are actively involved in the process and the framework is consistently followed. These tools and best practices can help teams stay on track throughout their development cycle and ensure products reach the market both swiftly and successfully:

Customer Collaboration

As a core value stated in the Agile Manifesto, customer collaboration is at the heart of every Agile project. Ensuring the development team has a clear understanding of the customer’s needs and feedback leads to products that are significantly more useful at launch.

Continuous Integration

Keeping code up to date can be accomplished by producing error-free builds throughout the day, enabling product delivery at any point in time.

Pair Programming

Pair programming is when two programmers work on a single project with the  goal to reduce bugs, enhance designs and encourage knowledge-sharing. One programmer takes on the role of the "driver" while the other "navigates" by providing feedback, watching and learning. 

Burndown Charts

A burndown chart displays the amount of work to be done versus the time left to complete. This representation leads to better project forecasting and ensures that all team members are aware of upcoming workloads.

Code Review

Allowing team members to review their peers' work can foster an environment of appreciation while reducing the number of mistakes brought to an Increment, leading to accelerated and streamlined project timelines.

How to Get Started With Agile: Resources

Getting started with Agile may sound daunting, as it typically requires a shift in how your team or company approaches work. But implementing Agile can often lead to better results overall. 

The first step of incorporating Agile is to get key stakeholders and teams all on the same page. Agile can’t work if all teams aren’t using the methodology.

Choosing the right Agile framework for your organization is a crucial part of implementing it successfully. Whether Scrum, Kanban or another framework is ultimately chosen, it’s best to stick with it. If you switch too often between Scrum and Lean, for example, your team might not be able to tap into the benefits of either.  

Above all, teams should prepare to adjust to the new way of working, staying on the lookout for common Agile mistakes to avoid . 

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What is agile?

Quick on your feet:  think for a minute of your favorite athlete. Unless this person is a bodybuilder, strength and sheer power are only part of the story. For most sportsmen and women, real success on the playing field comes with a certain hard-to-teach nimbleness—the ability to quickly take in new information and adjust strategy to achieve a specific result. Part of the appeal of sports is the excitement that comes with constant change , and—discounting the vicissitudes of luck—the result comes down to how athletes apply their abilities in response.

Get to know and directly engage with senior McKinsey experts on agile

Aaron De Smet and Sherina Ebrahim are senior partners in McKinsey’s New Jersey office; Christopher Handscomb is a partner in the London office, where Shail Thaker is a senior partner. Other experts include Krish Krishnakanthan , a senior partner in the Stamford office; and David Pralong , a senior partner in the Charlotte office.

Change is also a constant in business (and, yes, life). Agile, in business, is a way of working  that seeks to go with the flow of inevitable change rather than work against it. The Agile Manifesto , developed in 2001 as a way of optimizing software development, prioritizes individuals over processes, working prototypes over thorough documentation, customer collaboration over closed-door meetings, and swift response to change over following a set plan. In the years since its inception, agile has conferred competitive advantage  to the organizations that have applied it, in and out of the IT department.

As our business, social, economic, and political environments become increasingly volatile, the only way to meet the challenges of rapidly changing times is to change with them . Read on to learn more about agile and how to adopt an agile mindset.

Learn more about McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance  Practice.

What is an agile organization?

Let’s go back to sports for a minute. Maybe you’re a great free throw shooter in basketball. You make nine out of ten shots when you’re by yourself in your driveway, shooting around for fun. But when you meet friends for a pickup game at a nearby court, your shot is off. People keep jumping in front of you when you’re trying to line up, and maybe the sun is shining in your eyes from an unfavorable angle. You make maybe a couple of shots the whole game. The following week, disappointed by your performance on the court, you decide to make a change. Rather than doubling your practice time shooting in your driveway, you mix up your routine, practicing your shot at a couple of different courts at different times of day. Maybe you also ask a friend to run some defense drills with you so you can get used to shooting under pressure. Maybe you add a layup to your shot practice. This is a shift to an agile approach—and increases the likelihood that you’ll perform better the next time you play pickup.

Traditional organizations are—much like you shooting free throws in your driveway—optimized to operate in static, siloed situations of structural hierarchy. Planning is linear, and execution is controlled. The organization’s skeletal structure is strong but frequently rigid and slow moving.

Agile organizations are different. They’re designed for rapid change. An agile organization is a technology-enabled network of teams with a people-centered culture that operates in rapid-learning and fast-decision cycles. Agility adds speed and adaptability to stability, creating a competitive advantage in uncertain conditions.

What is kanban and what is scrum?

Kanban and scrum  are two organizational frameworks that fall under the umbrella of agile.

Kanban originated in the manufacturing plants of postwar Japan. Kanban, which is Japanese for “signboard,” was first developed to prioritize “just in time” delivery—that is, meeting demand rather than creating a surplus of products before they’re needed. With kanban, project managers create lanes of work that are required to deliver a product. A basic kanban board would have vertical lanes for processes—these processes could be “to do,” “doing,” “done,” and “deployed.” A product or assignment would move horizontally through the board.

The idea of scrum was invented by two of the original developers of agile methodology. A team of five to nine people is led by a scrum leader and product owner. The team sets its own commitments and engages in ceremonies like daily stand-up meetings and sprint planning, uniting in a shared goal.

Scrums, kanban, and other agile product management frameworks are not set in stone. They’re designed to be adapted and adjusted to fit the requirements of the project. One critical component of agile is the kaizen philosophy— a pillar of the Toyota production model —which is one of continuous improvement. With agile methodologies, the point is to learn from each iteration and adjust the process based on what’s learned.

What are the hallmarks of an agile organization?

A team or organization of any size or industry can be agile. But regardless of the details, all agile groups have five things in common .

North Star embodied across the organization

Agile organizations set a shared purpose and vision for the organization that helps people feel personally invested—that’s a North Star. This helps align teams with sometimes wildly varied remits and processes.

Network of empowered teams

Agile organizations typically replace top-down structures with flexible, scalable networks of teams. Agile networks should operate with high standards of alignment, accountability, expertise, transparency, and collaboration. Regardless of the configuration of the network, team members should feel a sense of ownership over their work and see a clear connection between their work and the business’s North Star.

Rapid decision  and learning cycles

Agile teams work in short cycles—or sprints—then learn from them by collecting feedback from users to apply to a future sprint. This quick-cycle model accelerates the pace throughout the organization, prioritizing quarterly cycles and dynamic management systems—such as objectives and key results (OKRs)—over annual planning.

Dynamic people model that ignites passion

An agile culture puts people at the center, seeking to create value for a much wider range of stakeholders, including employees, investors, partners, and communities. Making change personally meaningful for employees can build transformational momentum.

Next-generation enabling technology

Radical rethinking of an organizational model requires a fresh look at the technologies that enable processes. These include, for example, real-time communication and work management tools that support continually evolving operating processes.

Agility looks a little different for every organization. But the advantages in stability and dynamism that the above trademarks confer are the same—and are critical to succeeding in today’s rapidly changing competitive environment.

Introducing McKinsey Explainers : Direct answers to complex questions

How should an organization implement an agile transformation.

According to a McKinsey survey on agile transformations , the best way to go about an agile transformation is for an entire organization to transition to agile, rather than just individual departments or teams. This is ambitious but possible: New Zealand–based digital-services and telecommunications company Spark NZ managed to flip the entire organization to an agile operating model  in less than a year.

Any enterprise-wide agile transformation needs to be both comprehensive and iterative: comprehensive in the sense that it addresses strategy, structure, people, process, and technology and iterative in its acceptance that things will change along the way.

Transformations vary according to the size, industry, and scope of the business, but there are a common set of elements that can be divided into two components .

• The first phase of an agile transformation involves designing and piloting the new agile operating model. This usually starts with building the top team’s understanding and aspirations, creating a blueprint for how agile will add value, and implementing pilots.
• The second phase is about improving the process and creating more agile cells throughout the organization. Here, a significant amount of time is required from key leaders, as well as willingness to role model new mindsets. The best way to accomplish this phase is to recognize that not everything can be planned for, and implementation requires continuous measurement and adjustment.

Culture is a critical part of any agile transformation. Agile is a mindset; it’s not something an organization does— it’s something an organization is . Getting this transition right is key to overall success.

Agile is a mindset; it’s not something an organization does —it’s something an organization is .

Who should lead an agile transformation?

The single most important trait for the leader of an agile organization is an agile mindset, or inner agility . Simply put, inner agility is a comfortable relationship with change and uncertainty. And research has shown that a leader’s mindset, and how that mindset shapes organizational culture, can make or break a successful agile transformation.

Leaders need three sets of capabilities  for agile transformations:

Leaders must evolve new mindsets and behaviors.

For most of us, the natural impulse is to react. Research shows that people spend most of their time in a reactive mindset—reacting to challenges, circumstances, or other people. Because of this natural tendency, traditional organizations were designed to run on the reactive.

Agile organizations, by contrast, run on creative mindsets built on curiosity. A culture of innovation, collaboration, and value creation helps nurture the ability to flexibly respond to unexpected change. Creative mindsets also help members of an organization, at all levels, tap into their core passions and purposes .

Roche, a legacy biotech company, recognized the importance of a mindset shift at the leadership level. When the organization decided to build an agile culture , it invited more than 1,000 leaders to a four-day immersion program designed to enable leaders to shift from a reactive mindset to a creative one. Today, agility has been widely deployed within Roche, engaging tens of thousands of people in applying agile mindsets.

Leaders must help teams work in new and more effective ways.

Agility spells change for both leaders and their teams. Leaders need to give more autonomy and flexibility to their teams and trust them to do the right thing. For their part, teams should embrace a design-thinking  mentality and build toward working more efficiently, assuming more responsibility for the outcomes of their projects and being more accountable to customers.

Leaders must cocreate an agile organizational purpose, design, and culture.

A critical organization-level skill for leaders is the ability to distill and communicate a clear, shared, and compelling purpose, or North Star. Next, leaders need to design the strategy and operating model of the organization based on agile principles and practices. Finally, leaders need to shape a new culture across the organization, based on creative mindsets of discovery, partnership, and abundance.

For tips on how to develop agile leaders, see “ Leading agile transformation: The new capabilities leaders need to build 21st-century organizations .”

How can we build inner agility?

Inner agility can feel counterintuitive. Our impulse as humans is to simplify and solve problems by applying our expertise. But complex problems require complex solutions, and sometimes those solutions are beyond our expertise. Recognizing that our solutions aren’t working can feel like failure—but it doesn’t have to. To train themselves to address problems in a more agile way, leaders need to learn to think beyond their normal ways of solving problems.

Here are five ways to build inner agility :

Pause to move faster

This can be tough for leaders used to moving quickly. But pausing in the middle of the fray can create space for clearer judgment, original thinking, and purposeful action. This can take many forms: one CEO McKinsey has worked with takes a ten-minute walk outside the office without his cell phone. Others do breathing exercises between meetings. These practices can help leaders interrupt habits to create space for something different.

Embrace your ignorance

Being a know-it-all no longer works. The world is changing so fast that new ideas can come from anywhere. Competitors you’ve never heard of can suddenly reshape your industry. As change accelerates, listening and thinking from a place of not knowing is crucial to encouraging the discovery of original, surprising, breakthrough ideas.

Radically reframe the questions

We too frequently interrogate our ideas, asking ourselves questions we already know the answers to—and worse, questions whose answers confirm what we already believe. Instead, seek to ask truly challenging, open-ended questions. Those types of questions allow your employees and stakeholders to creatively discuss and describe what they’re seeing, and potentially unblock existing mental frameworks.

Set direction, not destination

In the increasing complexity of our era, solutions are rarely straightforward. Instead of setting a path from one point to another, share a purposeful vision with your team. Then join your team in heading toward a general goal, and in exploring and experimenting together to reach common goals.

Test your solutions—and yourself

Ideas may not work out as planned. But quick, cheap failures allow you to see what works and what doesn’t—and avoid major, costly disasters.

In times of stress, we often feel ourselves challenged. Rather than falling back on old habits, inner agility enables us to embrace complexity and use it to grow stronger.

What is deliberate calm?

Deliberate calm is a mindset that helps leaders keep a cool head during a crisis and steer their ships through a storm. It’s not something that comes naturally: in times of uncertainty, the human brain is wired to react rather than stay calm. The ability to step back and choose actions suited to a given situation is a skill that must be cultivated. In their 2022 book Deliberate Calm , McKinsey veterans Jacqueline Brassey , Aaron De Smet , and Michiel Kruyt describe their personal self-mastery practices to offer lessons in effective leadership through crises.

One important lesson? Not all crises are created equal. Inspired by the thinking of Harvard Business School professor Herman “Dutch” Leonard, De Smet differentiates between routine emergencies and crises of uncertainty. Routine emergencies can be dealt with using past experiences and training. But crises of uncertainty are different. In these moments, where you don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes, you can’t fall back on what you know. “If you are in an uncertain situation,” says De Smet, “the most important thing you can do is calm down. Take a breath. Take stock. ‘Is the thing I’m about to do the right thing to do?’ And in many cases, the answer is no. If you were in a truly uncertain environment, if you’re in new territory, the thing you would normally do might not be the right thing.”

For more from De Smet and his coauthors, check out their discussion on The McKinsey Podcast , their Author Talks interview , or order Deliberate Calm .

What is an agile transformation office?

Establishing an agile transformation office (ATO) can help improve the odds that an agile transformation will be successful. Embedded within an existing organizational structure, an ATO shapes and manages the transformation, brings the organization along, and—crucially—helps it achieve lasting cultural change.

To set up an ATO for success, an organization has to make three design decisions :

Agree on the ATO’s purpose and mandate

An ATO needs a purpose just as an agile organization needs a North Star. This step links an ATO specifically to the “why” of the transformation. An ATO’s mandate can include driving the transformation strategy, building capabilities, championing change, coaching senior leaders, managing interdependencies, and creating and refining best practices.

Define the ATO’s place within the organization

While an ATO’s reporting lines will depend on the organization, usually the leader of successful ATOs reports to the CEO or one of the CEO’s direct reports. This ensures tight alignment and support from top leadership.

Determine the ATO’s roles and responsibilities

Regardless of an ATO’s size or mandate, the following core capabilities should be managed by a strong transformation leader:

Execution leaders own the transformation road map, assessing and adjusting it on an ongoing basis.

Methodology owners gather lessons from the transformation and refine and evolve agile practices and behaviors.

Agile coaches guide teams through their transformations, helping to instill an agile culture and mindset.

Change management and communications experts maintain lines of communication through periods of change.

As agile principles become the norm across industries, an ATO can help usher in an agile transformation regardless of the design choices an organization makes in setting it up.

Can remote teams practice agile?

Agile teams typically rely on the camaraderie, community, and trust made possible by co-location. The remote work necessitated by the COVID-19 crisis has put this idea—along with many other assumptions about work and office culture—to the test.

While the shift was sudden, talented agile teams working through the crisis proved that productivity can be maintained with the right technology in place. Here are some targeted actions agile leaders can take to recalibrate their processes and sustain an agile culture  with remote teams.

Revisit team norms

Tools to ease teams into remote work abound—these include virtual whiteboards, instant chat, and videoconferencing. But they still represent a change from the in-person tools agile teams usually rely on for ceremonies. Team members need to help one another quickly get up to speed on how best to shift to virtual. Teams also need to make extra effort to capture the collective view, a special challenge when working remotely.

Cultivate bonding and morale

In the absence of in-person bonding activities, like lunches or spontaneous coffees, team members can bond virtually, such as by showing each other around their homes on a video call, introducing pets or family members, or sharing music or other personal interests. Being social is important in the virtual space, as well as in person, to nurture team cohesion.

Adapt coaching and development

Team leaders who normally do one-on-one coaching over coffee should transition as seamlessly as possible to remote coaching—coffee and all.

Establish a single source of truth

In person, agile team processes are usually informal. Teams make decisions with everyone in the room, so there’s not usually much need to record these discussions. In the virtual space, however, people might be absent or distracted, so it’s important to document team discussions in a way that can be referenced later.

Adjust to asynchronous collaboration

Messaging boards and chats can be useful in coordinating agile teams working remotely. But they should be used carefully, as they can also lead to team members feeling isolated.

Adapt a leadership approach

When working with remote teams, leaders need to be deliberate in guiding team members and interacting with external customers and stakeholders. Simply put, they need to show—in tone and approach—that everyone is in this together.

Now that it seems likely that remote work is here to stay , it’s all the more important that teams reinforce productivity by purposefully working to sustain an agile culture.

How can public-sector organizations benefit from agile?

The pandemic era and its attendant sociopolitical and economic crises have placed new pressures on public-sector organizations. In these situations of urgency, agile can help public-sector organizations better serve citizens by being more responsive.

Compared with the private sector, where agile has had a clear impact on the overall health of organizations , the public sector doesn’t immediately seem to be a great candidate for agile methodology. Government processes are often slower moving than their private-sector counterparts, and agencies are frequently in competition for funding, which can discourage collaboration. Finally, public-sector organizations are usually hierarchical; agile methodology works best in flat organizational structures.

But according to McKinsey analysis and experience, agile tools can still have an impact on public-sector productivity . As with any agile transformation, the approach should be tailored to each specific department, team, and organization.

Government entities, for example, might focus on short-term, results-driven management styles. OKRs and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are agile concepts that can transform planning and resource allocation for governments. Agencies, for their part, can benefit from increased collaboration and cross-pollination made possible by agile operating models.

For a more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance  Practice. Also check out agile-related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced include:

• “ When things get rocky, practice deliberate calm ,” November 10, 2022, Jacqueline Brassey  and Aaron De Smet
• “ In pursuit of value—not work ,” October 24, 2022, Elena Chong, Christopher Handscomb , Tomasz Maj, Rishi Markenday, Leslie Morse, and Dave West
• “ Why an agile transformation office is your ticket to real and lasting impact ,” June 30, 2021, Amit Anand, Khushpreet Kaur , Noor Narula, and  Belkis Vasquez-McCall
• “ The impact of agility: How to shape your organization to compete ,” May 25, 2021, Wouter Aghina , Christopher Handscomb , Olli Salo , and  Shail Thaker
• “ Doing vs being: Practical lessons on building an agile culture ,” August 4, 2020, Nikola Jurisic , Michael Lurie , Philippine Risch , and  Olli Salo
• “ All in: From recovery to agility at Spark New Zealand ,” McKinsey Quarterly , June 11, 2019, Simon Moutter, Jolie Hodson, Joe McCollum, David Pralong , Jason Inacio , and Tom Fleming
• “ The journey to an agile organization ,” May 10, 2019, Daniel Brosseau , Sherina Ebrahim , Christopher Handscomb , and  Shail Thaker
• “ Leading agile transformation: The new capabilities leaders need to build 21st-century organizations ,” October 1, 2018, Aaron De Smet , Michael Lurie , and Andrew St. George
• “ Agile with a capital ‘A’: A guide to the principles and pitfalls of agile development ,” February 12, 2018, Hugo Sarrazin, Belkis Vasquez-McCall , and Simon London
• “ The five trademarks of agile organizations ,” January 22, 2018, Wouter Aghina , Karin Ahlback, Aaron De Smet , Gerald Lackey, Michael Lurie , Monica Murarka, and  Christopher Handscomb
• “ A business leader’s guide to agile ,” July 25, 2017, Santiago Comella-Dorda , Krish Krishnakanthan , Jeff Maurone, and  Gayatri Shenai
• “ ING’s agile transformation ,”  McKinsey Quarterly , January 10, 2017, Peter Jacobs, Bart Schlatmann, and  Deepak Mahadevan

Want to know more about agile?

Related articles.

Beyond the anecdote: True drivers of digital-delivery performance

Why an agile transformation office is your ticket to real and lasting impact

The impact of agility: How to shape your organization to compete

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What is agile methodology? Modern software development explained

Everyone talks about agile development, but how does it really work learn how teams use scrum, kanban, and other agile methodologies to deliver better software..

Contributor, InfoWorld |

What is agile software development methodology

Roles in agile methodology, what are scrum and kanban, technical best practices for agile organizations.

It’s hard to believe that the agile software development methodology officially turned 20 years old last year. What once was an outlying practice for startups collaborating in colocated spaces with stickies and whiteboards is now a sophisticated, scalable, and widely used set of agile software development processes and tools.

There’s a rich history behind agile software development and why organizations use agile methods such as scrum and kanban to modernize applications, improve customer experience, and implement digital transformations . There’s also a tremendous body of knowledge around these methodologies and their intersections with design thinking, product management, and devops . Fewer people today ask, “What is agile?” More are seeking guidance for how to align their teams on agile best practices.

This article is a primer on agile methodologies, starting with people, teams, processes, and tools. You’ll also learn how agile connects to devops, and about best practices that help organizations cultivate an agile culture and deliver better software.

An agile software development process always starts by defining the users for a particular product and documenting a vision statement for the scope of problems, opportunities, and values to be addressed. The product owner captures this vision and works with a multidisciplinary team (or teams) to deliver on it. Several roles are involved in an agile development process.

An agile process always begins with the user or customer in mind. Today, we often define user personas to illustrate different workflow roles or types of customer needs and behaviors.

Product owner

The product owner is tasked to be the voice of the customer, including any internal stakeholders. This person distills insights, ideas, and feedback to create a product vision. Product visions are often short and straightforward, but they nonetheless paint a picture of who the customer or user is, what values are being addressed, and a strategy for addressing them. I imagine Google’s original vision looked something like, “Let’s make it easy for anyone with internet access to find relevant websites and webpages with a simple, keyword-driven interface and an algorithm that ranks reputable sources higher in the search results.”

Whatever the vision, the product owner is responsible for defining it and then working with the development team to make it real.

To work with the development team, the product owner breaks down the product vision into a series of user stories . Each user story should identify the target users, their challenges, why the solution is needed, and what constraints and acceptance criteria define the solution. The product owner prioritizes these user stories and reviews them with the team to ensure they have a shared understanding of what is being asked of them.

Software development team

Teams should be multidisciplinary and include a diverse group with the skills and backgrounds to get the job done. In addition to developers, agile development teams should include quality assurance automation engineers, data engineers, user experience (UX) designers, and other roles depending on the type of software project.

Agile focuses teams on delivering working software, so they must complete end-to-end functioning applications, integrations, and other deliverables that impact users—not just the technical components. Team members must align on what they are building, who is doing what, and how the software will be developed .

Agile teams often have other roles assigned, including the following:

• Tech or team leads partner with the product owner on architecture, non-functional acceptance criteria, sequencing, dependencies, and other technology and security considerations. Tech leads have broad responsibilities that might include estimating stories and planning implementation details with the team.
• Scrum masters often coach new teams on agile processes, responsibilities, and tools. Scrum master responsibilities can include resolving blocks that impede progress, reviewing approaches to improve the agile team’s velocity , and grooming backlogs .
• Business analysts partner with the product owner. The analysts’ responsibilities often include creating wireframes, documenting user stories, and reviewing test results. Business analysts are especially helpful when software development teams are developing microservices and other technical products, and where the business analyst has more software development knowledge than the product owner.

It is up to organizational leaders to decide how to staff agile teams and how big to make them. Many follow Jeff Bezos’s best practice of constructing two pizza-size agile teams to maximize the collaboration between teammates.

Once a product vision and team (or teams) adopt agile principles, starting with the ones identified in the agile manifesto , the organization must select a process methodology. Scrum and kanban are the primary agile processes.

Some organizations start with kanban because it’s relatively easy to explain and implement. Kanban works as a fan-in and fan-out process where the team pulls user stories from an intake board and funnels them through a workflow until they are marked done.

But many organizations implement scrum , which organizes the work in cadences called sprints , usually lasting one or two weeks. The product owner writes the requirements as user stories, then prioritizes them in a backlog based on their business value. The team reviews the backlog and commits to the top user stories they can complete during the sprint.

Scrum includes several standard meetings (sometimes called scrum ceremonies or scrum rituals ) to help teams commit to sprint priorities, complete the work during the sprint, and end each sprint successfully. These meetings usually include a few common elements:

• Sprint planning is where the product owner shares priorities, and the team decides how much work it can complete during the sprint. 
• Daily standup meetings help teams discuss the status of user stories; teammates share their daily goals, and anyone can escalate blocks that impede the team’s progress.
• Sprint reviews are demo meetings at the end of the sprint, where the functionality is shown to the product owner to gain acceptance on completed work.
• Retrospective meetings are where the team discusses what went well and what needs improvement in their agile and software development processes.

It should be noted that these practices are adaptable to agile hybrid work models .

Scrum improves a team’s performance by empowering the team to commit to an achievable amount of work rather than having a product, program, or project manager specify the expected timeline and scope. The user story forms a microcontract that separates business need, the acceptance criteria (or what agile teams sometimes call the definition of done ), and then enables teams to self-organize on how to implement. Sprint reviews are one type of feedback loop , and product owners are encouraged to realign priorities and redefine requirements before each sprint. Sprint retrospectives help the team improve collaboration and initiate process improvements.

Scrum forms the basic process for teams collaborating, planning, and delivering, but it doesn’t speak to technical best practices, organizational standards, or defining and driving agile cultures.

Today, many technical best practices include defining the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and implementing devops processes. The SDLC provides guidelines on writing code, managing software assets, and developing technical standards . Devops automations like CI/CD , Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and continuous testing enable a more reliable path to production. Other practices, including shift-left security practices , observable microservices , feature flagging , canary releases , and AIOps , provide a more flexible and reliable delivery model.

The combination of empowering self-organizing teams, agile methodologies, devops automations, and modernizing to cloud architectures helps technology organizations evolve their culture. Longer development cycles are replaced by continuous delivery models that enable releasing features and improvements faster. Automations address many gaps between developers seeking autonomy and speed with operations responsibilities around performance, reliability, and security. Combining these practices helps agile teams make smarter architecture decisions, drive experimentation, become more data driven, and correct mistakes quickly.

Other practices like integrating design thinking with scrum , implementing value streams , developing product management practices , and implementing continuous planning help agile teams collaborate with customers, end-users, and business stakeholders. 

Agile teams typically deploy tools like Jira Software, Azure DevOps, and Digital.ai to collaborate on agile backlogs and kanban boards. These tools help agile teams prioritize work, capture requirements, complete user stories, review burndown reports , and automate workflows using version control, CI/CD, and other tools. 

Conceptual frameworks and guides such as SAFe, Enterprise Scrum, LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), the Spotify Model, and StarCIO Agile can help drive agile principles, standards, and practices across many collaborating teams.

Most coaches recommend starting agile practices with well-defined business objectives, a few selected teams, and limited, optimally chosen tools. The challenge for organization leaders is to find the right balance of diverse teams, self-organization principles, standards, tools, and integrations that enable their organizations to build, extend, scale, and maintain technology capabilities.

Next read this:

• Why companies are leaving the cloud
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Isaac Sacolick is president of StarCIO and the author of the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation through Technology and Digital Trailblazer: Essential Lessons to Jumpstart Transformation and Accelerate Your Technology Leadership . He covers agile planning , devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO and digital transformation influencer. He has published more than 900 articles at InfoWorld.com , CIO.com , his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation , and other sites.

Copyright © 2024 IDG Communications, Inc.

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• Understanding DevOps
• What is agile methodology?

Agile is an approach to software development that seeks the continuous delivery of working software created in rapid iterations. 

However, the phrase "agile methodology" is misleading because it implies that agile is a singular approach to software development. Agile is not a set of prescriptions for exactly which actions to take in software development. Instead, it is a way of thinking about collaboration and workflows and it is a set of values which guide our choices in regards to what we make and how we make it.

In practical terms, agile software development methodologies are all about delivering small pieces of working software quickly to improve customer satisfaction. These methodologies use adaptive approaches and teamwork to focus on continuous improvement. Usually, agile software development consists of small, self-organizing teams of software developers and business representatives regularly meeting in-person throughout the software development life cycle . Agile favors a lightweight approach to software documentation and embraces—rather than resists—changes at any stage of the life cycle.

Agile values

Agile as we know it today traces its history to 2001. Reacting to waterfall approaches to project management, which organizes a software project as a series of linear sequences, a group of software developers penned The Manifesto for Agile Software Development. In this document the programmers proposed a new approach to software development and described 4 key characteristics that they believed should be valued over other concerns. As they put it, agile software development teams should value:

• Individuals and interactions  over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

The authors clarify that all items on the above list do have some inherent value. However, they propose that valuing the items on the left (bolded) above those on the right can lead to better outcomes in product development. The agile manifesto does not set out to prescribe a set of practices; it is guidance for a new way of thinking about software development.

There have been many practical outcomes of the agile manifesto. For instance, instead of developing software sequentially from one phase to the next, which is how the waterfall method ensures product quality, an agile method can promote development and testing as concurrent and continuous processes. Put another way, waterfall development holds that an entire phase should be completed before moving on to the next, whereas agile supports multiple sequences happening at the same time. 

Where did agile come from?

Agile approaches to work were created to address the perceived limitations of the waterfall methodology, which was derived from the manufacturing method of Henry Ford’s 1913 assembly line and later applied to software development. Since its founding in 2001, agile development has flourished in the software industry and project management, though it has many variations.

Agile started when many software developers began noticing that the production cycles and collaboration methods of waterfall were not producing the desired results. This problem had become pervasive by the early 1990s, when it became common for a several years lag to persist between an organization's validated business need and the delivery of a working application. Business demands and markets could change enough during those years that large parts of software projects would be cancelled before they were ever delivered. This waste of time and resources led many software developers to seek an alternative.

Faced with the threat of disruption, organizations increasingly adopt digital transformation strategies to keep up with the accelerating pace of business. And when they do, agile software development frequently plays a role.

Agile forms the basis of many of today’s digital workflows. Cloud computing , with its flexible, scalable, IT infrastructure, has grown up in parallel with the demands of agile software development. Cloud-native development embraces an agile-like notion of software as a series of interconnected services that scale to meet business needs.

DevOps as a concept breaks down the old wall between software development and operations. SRE is an implementation of DevOps that uses software as a tool to manage systems and automate operations tasks.  CI/CD methods accept that software will change continuously, and gives developers tools to accelerate the speed at which they can deploy new code.

By now you may have noticed that the concept of "agile methodology" is itself an agile idea, responding to the needs of its customers (that is, software developers) through changing times. Keep this in mind as we take a brief look at a variety of agile frameworks, which carry different names and often vary from one implementation to another.

Agile frameworks

Agile frameworks for software development—like Scrum, kanban, or extreme programming (XP)— form the basis for popular software development processes like DevOps and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Scrum is perhaps the most popular agile framework in use today but not all agile is Scrum and, honestly, not all Scrum is agile. Scrum is a framework for managing work designed for small, cross-functional teams of 5 to 9 people who break their work into actions that can be completed within a consistent period of time called a sprint. Scrum teams consist of team members, a Scrum master, and a product owner. Typically, Scrum is implemented when a large project can be broken up into 2- to 4-week sprints. Scrum focuses on feedback loops through a ceremony called the "retrospective." The unofficial motto of Scrum could be "inspect and adapt."

Other agile frameworks, notably kanban, predate the agile manifesto. But these frameworks are considered to be agile because they promote the values outlined in the agile manifesto. There are too many agile frameworks and approaches to scaling agile to list all of them here.

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If you want to take full advantage of the agility and responsiveness of DevOps, IT security must play a role in the full life cycle of your apps.

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CI/CD introduces ongoing automation and continuous monitoring throughout the lifecycle of apps, from integration and testing phases to delivery and deployment.

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What Is Agile Methodology in Project Management?

• 1.  Project Management Basics
• 2.  Project Management Methodologies
• 3.  Project Management Life Cycle
• 4.  Best Project Management Software
• 5.  Team Collaboration Tips
• 6.  Agile Methodology Basics
• 7.  Agile Project Management Tools & Techniques
• 8.  Project Management Frameworks
• 9.  Resources
• 10.  Glossary
• Advanced Terminology
• Methodologies
• PM Software Features
• Basic Terminology
• Professional Development
• Agile Project Management

What Is Agile Methodology?

Agile methodology is a project management approach that prioritizes cross-functional collaboration and continuous improvement. It divides projects into smaller phases and guides teams through cycles of planning, execution, and evaluation.

In this article, we share everything you need to know about Agile methodologies, Agile project management, Agile methodology frameworks, and how to implement them in your team. We’ll also share our Agile teamwork template to get started with Agile even faster.

[ Continue reading after the links ]

Quick links to explore Agile methodology related topics

• Agile Methodology basics
• Different types of Agile methodologies
• Four pillars of Agile
• Six stages of the Agile life cycle
• Agile Guide (complete guide)
• Scrum Guide (complete guide)
• Kanban Guide (complete guide)

Agile methodologies overview

The Agile Manifesto for Software Development put forth a groundbreaking mindset on delivering value and collaborating with customers when it was created in 2001.

Agile’s four main values are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

You can read more about the four pillars of Agile in our Agile guide.

What is Agile project management?

Agile project management is a process for managing a project that involves constant collaboration and working in iterations. It works off the basis that a project can be continuously improved upon throughout its life cycle and adapt to changes quickly.

What are the benefits of using Agile methodology?

Agile is one of the most popular approaches to project management because it is flexible, it is adaptable to changes and it encourages customer feedback.

Many teams embrace the Agile approach for the following reasons:

• Rapid progress: By effectively reducing the time it takes to complete various stages of a project, teams can elicit feedback in real time and produce working prototypes or demos throughout the process
• Customer and stakeholder alignment: Through focusing on customer concerns and stakeholder feedback, the Agile team is well positioned to produce results that satisfy the right people
• Continuous improvement: As an iterative approach, Agile project management allows teams to chip away at tasks until they reach the best end result

You can read more about the six stages of the Agile life cycle in our Agile guide.

See below an example from Wrike’s Agile project management dashboard from our Agile teamwork template . 

[ Continue reading after the image ]

Types of Agile methodologies

Agile project management is not a singular framework but an umbrella term that includes a wide range of methodologies, including Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), and the Adaptive Project Framework (APF).

Scrum: It is ideal for projects with rapidly changing requirements, using short sprints. Kanban: It visualizes project progress and is great for tasks requiring steady output. Lean: It streamlines processes, eliminating waste for customer value. Extreme Programming (XP): It enhances software quality and responsiveness to customer satisfaction. Adaptive Project Framework (APF): Works well for projects with unclear details, as it adapts to constantly evolving client needs.

You can learn more about the different types of Agile methodologies in our guide.

Agile methodologies vs. traditional approaches

So, how do these Agile methodologies compare to traditional approaches to project management? Let’s highlight the Waterfall approach as an example.

When working with this traditional methodology, teams would follow a strictly linear sequence: requirements gathering, design, build, test, deliver. They are required to complete one phase before moving on to the next one. Changes are difficult to incorporate once a stage is completed and customer interactions are limited. As a result, Waterfall suits projects with fixed guidelines and minimal changes. 

By comparison, Agile methodologies are far more fluid in nature. Every Agile framework emphasizes a degree of adaptability, breaking projects into phases and embracing changing requirements. Through iterations and incremental efforts, they incorporate collaboration and customer feedback, leading to continuous improvement.

Agile in software development

Agile enables software development teams to stay adaptable.

With an iterative and adaptive approach, the aim is to produce the highest-quality software product that puts the customer at the heart of the process. By prioritizing flexibility, Agile teams can quickly react to changes, deliver products faster, and thrive in a collaborative environment.

By building Agile teams with the right qualities — such as self-organization and effective collaboration — you can accelerate the software development process while leaving space for vital customer feedback.

One of the most compelling reasons to adopt the Agile approach in software development is the dynamic workflows and work systems that contribute to a better end product. By listening to customer feedback and carrying out several iterations and rounds of software testing, you can iron out any kinks along the way and build the best possible software.

The Agile software development life cycle helps you break down each project you take on into six simple stages:

• Concept: Define the project scope and priorities
• Inception: Build the Agile team according to project requirements 
• Iteration: Create code factoring in customer feedback 
• Release: Test the code and troubleshoot any issues
• Maintenance: Provide ongoing tech support to ensure the product remains serviceable
• Retirement: The end of the product lifespan, which often coincides with the beginning of a new one

Read more about the Agile software development life cycle in our Agile guide.

Agile methodology in non-software projects

While many think of the Agile methodology as a solution mostly for the software industry, its applications extend far beyond.

Here are some examples of Agile methodology in action in various project types:

Marketing campaigns

By bringing together designers, marketers, writers and colleagues from other departments, you can build a cross-functional team ready to tackle marketing campaigns. Using sprints and a task backlog, you can identify the highest-priority tasks and streamline the execution.

To explore this approach, download the eBook 7 steps to developing an Agile Marketing Team . 

Event planning

Agile methodologies lend themselves well to event planning, as each part of the event can be broken down into a sprint, and daily standups or Kanban boards can help you maintain a clear strategic direction at all times.

Product development

As you might imagine, since Agile methodology works for virtual products, it can work just as well for physical products. This time, though, instead of troubleshooting code, you’ll be diagnosing and fixing prototypes.

Generally, to get the best out of any of the Agile methodologies for non-software projects, you should always aim to keep the customer in mind. Just as Agile software development must factor in the end user, non-software use cases benefit from a customer-focused approach.

By integrating the customer and their feedback in everything you do, you can better organize your priorities and plan your phases. It’s also a good idea to evaluate whether you need a systematic approach to tackling major projects or an easy-to-follow visual workflow for a series of smaller projects, as this can influence which framework is best for your team.

How to implement Agile methodology into projects

If you’re wondering how to apply these theoretical frameworks to your team’s workflows, here’s a step-by-step guide for Agile methodology implementation: 

1. Choose the right Agile framework

Your first priority is to select the right Agile framework for your team. 

Here’s a reminder of some of the most popular options:

• Scrum: Principle-based project management
• Kanban: Visual workflows and processes
• Scrumban: Hybrid of Scrum and Kanban
• XP: Customer-focused product development
• APF: Versatile teamwork

When selecting an Agile framework, consider the size of your team, the specific project requirements, and the level of experience your team has with the various methodologies. 

The more you know about your team and the projects you handle on a regular basis, the easier it will be for you to pick the right framework every time. 

2. Assemble your Agile team

An Agile team isn’t like any ordinary team.

If you want to find success with any of the Agile methodologies, you need to build a team with clear roles and responsibilities and a culture of collaboration.

What are some of the responsibilities of an Agile team?

• Self-organization : One of the cornerstones of an Agile team is the ability to self-organize. In Agile project management, the onus is on individual team members and teams to take initiative and organize themselves in a way that will lead to the highest output.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Going hand in hand with the need for self-organization is the Agile demand for cross-functional collaboration. Agile teams have to relay information across departments and be able to work closely with a range of colleagues.
• Iteration planning: Specific to Agile project management, iteration planning requires team members to outline the scope of individual sprints according to the product backlog.

3. Plan the project

Now that you’ve selected one of the Agile methods and assembled your A-team, it’s time to plan out your project.

Meticulous planning is one of the secret ingredients of successful Agile project management.

From the outset, you need to spend time clearly defining your project goals and scope. This will prevent unexpected setbacks and allow you to break down each portion of the project into manageable sprints (if you’re using Scrum).

You might also draw up a product backlog during the planning phase, which is most common in software development projects. The product backlog allows you to assign a priority level to your tasks so everyone on the team knows what they should focus on.

[ Continue reading after the animation ]

4. Manage stakeholder expectations 

Before you get your project underway, it’s important to check in with any key stakeholders to make sure you factor in their feedback.

Depending on the level of their involvement, your project stakeholders may then want to be kept in the loop throughout the process or at least receive regular updates. Creating feedback loops eases any uncertainty on the stakeholder end and allows you to stay open to change should it be necessary at any stage of the process.

5. Measure success 

Measuring project success is key to making meaningful progress with your Agile methodology of choice.

By paying attention to what worked and what didn’t during the project management process, you can extract key lessons to apply to future Agile projects. 

There are various ways to effectively track progress and measure success with Agile projects:

• Daily standups: Brief meetings to discuss obstacles and find solutions
• Sprint reviews : Informal sit-down meetings to present work and solicit team feedback
• Retrospectives: Reflections on past work to inspire and influence future progress

You should also introduce key performance indicators (KPIs) before embarking on any new major project, as getting specific will help you establish milestones and measure progress.

Implement Agile methodologies with Wrike

Now, you’re probably ready to start using Agile in project management following the steps we’ve shared . Wrike’s work management platform can support your team with resources to manage all - sprints, backlogs, and more. 

Our Agile teamwork template will help you set up your processes and launch your first project with Agile. Once you’re underway, you can use Kanban boards to manage your team’s workflows, visualizing progress and simplifying the process of assigning and completing tasks.

You can also use Wrike to oversee progress across your different departments  with cross-tagging and project dashboards that update to reflect changes in real time.

So, get started with Agile today and empower your projects in one platform.

Further reading:

• Agile Guide
• Scrum Guide
• Kanban Guide
• Should Your Business Go Agile? (Infographic)
• 8 Attitudes Guaranteed to Sink Your Agile Projects
• Is Agile Viable for Marketing Teams?

Basic Project Management

• Project Charter
• Project Management Stakeholders
• What is a Project?
• Work Breakdown Structure
• Project Objectives
• Project Baseline
• Project Management Scheduling
• Project Management Work Packages
• Project Management Scope
• Scope Creep

Advanced Project Management

• What is PERT?
• Network Diagram
• Risk Management
• Cost Estimation
• Feasibility Study
• Monte Carlo Analysis
• Project Integration
• Cost Management
• PMI Project Management
• What To Do With Certification
• Certification
• Become Certified
• PMP Certification
• Best Certification

Software Features

• Critical Success Factors
• Capacity Planning
• User Role Access Permissions
• Time Tracking
• Budget Tracking
• Request Forms
• Work Assignments
• Version Control
• Dependency Managements
• Project management Milestones
• Project Management Software
• Project Management Tools
• Project Management System
• Gantt Charts

Agile Methodology

Those who work in or near the industry are aware that the art of software development is unique and distinct from other types of engineering projects. It necessitates the attention and care of a team that is adaptive and flexible, as well as those who are eager to respond promptly to adjustments and won't bat an eyelid when a client makes an overnight request. That's what Agile methodology is.

We will cover the following:

• What is Agile Methodology?
• Stages of Agile Methodology
• Types of Agile Methodology
• Benefits of Agile Methodology

What is Agile Monitoring?

The Agile methodology is a practice that encourages continuous development and testing throughout the software development lifecycle of a project. Unlike the Waterfall methodology , the Agile methodology allows for parallel development and testing.

Agile methodologies attempt to produce the proper product through small cross-functional self-organizing teams that produce small pieces of functionality on a regular basis, allowing for frequent customer input and course correction as needed. In doing so, Agile tries to address the issues that traditional "waterfall" methodologies of delivering huge products over extended periods of time encounter, such as client requirements changing frequently and resulting in the delivery of incorrect products.

Stages of Agile Monitoring

Agile development is not that tough when broken down to its core concepts. While the number of meetings involved may appear unnecessary, it saves a lot of time by optimizing development tasks and avoiding the errors that can occur during the planning stages.

Phase 1: Requirements

Before a Product Owner can begin creating a project, they must first generate the initial documentation, which includes a description of the project's needs. They are as follows:

• The eventual result that the initiative will attain. For example , a text editor.
• The functionality will provide. For example , different font sizes.
• The features that it will not originally support. For example , adding text animations or the ability to embed video.

A general guideline is to reduce these initial needs as much as possible, adding just the elements that are absolutely necessary and discarding those that will not be used frequently. Developers can work on them once the application has been released and the core features have been tested.

Phase 2: Design

In software development, there are two approaches to design: one is visual design, and the other is the app's architectural structure.

Software Design

The Product Owner gathers their development team and introduces the requirements developed during the previous stage during the first iteration. The team then explores how to approach these objectives and suggests the tools required to obtain the best outcome. The developers debate feature implementation and the internal structure of the come in subsequent iterations.

UI/UX Design

The designers build a rough mock-up of the user interface during this stage of the SDLC. When it comes to consumer products, the user interface and user experience are crucial. As a result, it's a good idea to look at potential competitors to evaluate what they're doing correctly — and, more importantly, what they're doing poorly.

The basic design is refined and/or reworked to accommodate the new features in subsequent iterations.

Phase 3. Development and Coding

Within the software development process, the development phase includes producing code and translating design documentation into actual software. This is the most time-consuming stage of the SDLC because it forms the foundation of the entire process.

There aren't many differences between iterations in this case.

Phase 4: Integration and Testing

During this stage, the developers ensure that the software is bug-free and compatible with everything else they've built previously. The Quality Assurance team runs a series of tests to check that the code is clean and that the solution's business goals are satisfied.

Testing grows more comprehensive as this SDLC stage progresses, and includes not only functional testing but also systems integration, interoperability, and user acceptance testing, among other things.

Phase 5. Implementation and Deployment

The program is installed on the servers and made available to customers, either as a demonstration or for actual use. Iterations after that update the existing software, adding new features and fixing issues.

Phase 6: Review

The Product Owner gathers the Development Team once more after all previous development phases have been completed to discuss the progress achieved toward meeting the requirements. The team presents their ideas for correcting the issues that developed during the previous phases, and the Product Owner considers their suggestions.

The Agile software development lifecycle phases then begin over, either with a new iteration or by progressing to the next stage and scaling Agile.

Types of Agile Monitoring

Scrum and Kanban are two of the most prominent tools for supporting the Agile development life cycle.

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland created the Scrum approach, which provides a basic framework for working on big projects. Agile software development approaches are iterative, which means the work is divided into iterations or Sprints in Scrum's instance. Scrum is carried out by small groups of 7-9 persons, who include a Scrum Master and a Product Owner.

Projects in Scrum are broken into Sprints, which are typically two or three weeks long. A Sprint is a set of features that must be produced within a certain amount of time. Multiple sprints may be merged to make a Release, which is the formal delivery of software/product to the customer/market.

The Product Owner breaks down the overall product functionality into smaller pieces. Each Sprint or Iteration prioritizes and tackles these Stories. The goal of the process is for the team to be able to show the Product Owner working bits of the product at the conclusion of each Sprint to ensure that it is operating as intended.

Overall, the Scrum technique divides the long waterfall process into smaller cycles, allowing product teams and end-customers to assess functioning software on a regular basis and ensure that it satisfies their business needs. This guarantees that the completed product fulfils the customer's ultimate specifications.

The Daily Stand-up meeting, the Sprint Review Meeting, the Demo to the Product Owner, and the Sprint Retrospective meeting are all part of the Scrum methodology. All of these meetings allow the team to collaborate and review the project to verify that it is moving as planned and that any concerns are immediately remedied.

In the early to mid-2000s, David Anderson established the Kanban Method in reaction to some of the issues of other Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum. While attempting to address the issues with traditional/waterfall approaches, these methods fell victim to some of the same issues.

The 2-3 week sprint cycle was too long for many business contexts, and the associated changes in organizational structure and project management/planning processes put firms under too much strain, and many teams found themselves failing to meet even sprint-level scope and quality commitments. Implementing these strategies was quite disruptive for most firms.

The Kanban method was designed as the polar opposite of that – a non-disruptive evolutionary method for improvement that allows teams to deliver continuously rather than in time-frames of 2-3 weeks, receive feedback faster and shorten the time it takes to offer value to customers.

Kanban is a visual management approach for tracking work as it progresses through a process. Kanban depicts both the process (workflow) and the actual work that passes through it. Kanban's goal is to identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks in your process so that work can flow at a cost-effective rate.

Benefits of Agile Monitoring

Agile's advantages are directly related to its faster, lighter, and more involved mindset. In a nutshell, the process ensures that the consumer gets what they want when they want it. There is far less time spent developing in the wrong direction, and the entire system responds to changes much faster.

• Faster is Better One of the most significant advantages of Agile Methodology is its speed. A shorter software development life cycle means that there is less time between paying and receiving payment. As a result, the company will get more profit.
• Customer Satisfaction has Improved Customers don't have to wait months or years for exactly what they don't want with Agile. Rather, they receive fast iterations of something that is extremely near to what they desire. The system adapts swiftly to changes in the overall environment in order to refine the successful client solution.
• Employees are Valued Employees who are encouraged to contribute their ideas are far more productive than those who are told to follow a set of rules. Employees are respected in the Agile Methodology because they are given an objective and then trusted to achieve it. Employees are in the best position to respond to problems and fulfill the goals at hand because they have their hands on the controls and witness the difficulties that arise every day.
• Rework is No Longer Necessary The project stays on track and in tune with customer needs at every level by involving the client in more than just the requirements and delivery phases. Between the time we complete the task and the time the customer proposes adjustments, there will be less backtracking and “going out on a limb” time.

Software development is a systematic procedure. However, there is no single “correct” approach to implement Agile – only ones that work for or against a specific team. Each organization has its own definition of what defines an Agile development lifecycle, and each has its own set of advantages. At the end of the day, what matters is a high-quality product that is delivered on time.

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What is scrum?

Scrum is a lightweight agile framework designed to help teams collaborate on complex products iteratively and incrementally to deliver high value. It is built on the principles of empiricism and lean thinking.

How it works

Scrum values, empiricism and iteration.

• Explore certifications

What is the scrum framework?

Scrum is a lightweight yet incredibly powerful framework. Scrum relies on cross-functional and self-managing teams to deliver products and services in short cycles, enabling:

• Fast feedback
• Quicker innovation
• Continuous improvement
• Rapid adaptation to change
• Delighted customers
• Reduced time from idea to delivery

The term scrum comes from a 1986 Harvard Business Review article ( The New New Product Development Game ) in which authors Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka made an analogy comparing high-performing, cross-functional teams to the scrummage used by rugby teams. Ken Scwaber and Jeff Sutherland first introduced scrum as a framework at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) conference in 1995 in Austin, Texas.

Though it has its roots in software development, today scrum is used in almost every industry so that teams can solve complex problems and deliver innovative products and services that truly delight customers.

Scrum essentials in under 10 minutes

Scrum is the most widely used and popular agile framework. The term "Agile" describes a specific set of foundational principles and values for organizing and managing complex work based on the Agile Manifesto . The creators of the manifesto also considered the words "lightweight" and "adaptive," and eventually all agreed that "agile" was the most effective term for their purposes. The Agile Manifesto was published on February 11, 2001.

Scrum embodies agile principles by enabling teams to adapt quickly to changes (in market requirements, conditions, new regulations, etc.), prioritize customer feedback, and deliver work in manageable increments. Scrum is considered agile because of the agile principles and values it supports:

The Agile Manifesto explains how its creators came to value:

"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."

Scrum benefits

Practicing scrum offers several advantages, including:

• Minimized risk
• Enhanced ability to manage changing priorities 
• Ability to uncover bottlenecks in teams and organizations that get in the way of value delivery
• Increased transparency for stakeholders by delivering working product increments frequently
• Opportunities to inspect and adapt, thereby making course corrections based on what is learned

This framework incorporates inspection and adaptation at regular intervals, helping teams to continuously improve their interactions, reduce time to market, and increase customer satisfaction through regular feedback loops. Moreover, scrum's emphasis on transparency and collaboration fosters a more engaged and motivated team environment, which can lead to higher productivity and better outcomes.

Scrum teams inspect each increment of functionality as it is completed and then adapt what will be done next based on learning and feedback, minimizing risk, and reducing waste. This cycle repeats and continuously gives the stakeholders, business, and the scrum team the opportunity to adjust to changing market conditions, competition, and other reasons for pivoting.

Scrum's effectiveness lies in its simplicity and flexibility, described later in this page. While it is possible to practice scrum without embodying the scrum values and empiricism (i.e. mechanical scrum), the true benefits of adopting scrum can only be achieved when the scrum team and the organization embody the scrum values and empiricism. Along with organizational and culture shifts catalyzed by adopting those values, the framework has practices based on three core components: Scrum consists of: 

• Accountabilities
• Events 

These core components, along with a few simple rules, work together to create a cycle of continuous improvement and adaptation, ensuring that the teams and the organizations can respond swiftly to changes and deliver high-value products effectively.

Scrum accountabilities

Scrum has three accountabilities (previously called "roles") ensuring that every aspect of the shared work is managed effectively.

• Developers: Professionals in the scrum team who work together to create any aspect of the product. They create the product increment(s) during the sprint. People with any skill needed to build the product take on the accountability of a developer. Depending on the nature of the product, the skills will be different. 
• Product  owner : The product owner develops and communicates the product goal, owns the product backlog, and ensures the team is always addressing the highest value work. They also balance the needs of stakeholders, customers, and the team. They know and understand the domain, the market for their products, and they are passionate about delivering results that customers and users want and need.
• Scrum  master : The scrum master leads and guides the organization in its scrum adoption and practice. The scrum master helps the team build the product and become the best team they can be by guiding them to use scrum and embody agile principles. They coach the team toward effective use of the events and artifacts. Their day may include helping the team manage impediments, and they are often essential to the growth of the team as a whole as well as individuals. 

There are also many ways scrum masters serve the organization, including coaching the organization and stakeholders in scrum adoption and empiricism.

The scrum team is made up of these accountabilities. A team has one scrum master, one product owner , and the developers. The size of a scrum team is usually fewer than 10 people. The team is self-managing and cross-functional. Many responsibilities of a traditional project manager are divided between the accountabilities while other project management responsibilities may become unnecessary.

Scrum events

There are five events in the scrum framework. These events are valuable opportunities to inspect and adapt the product or the way the team works together (and sometimes both).

• The sprint : The core of scrum, a timeboxed period (less than one month long and frequently 1-2 weeks) during which one or more increments are created. The sprint contains all of the other events.
• Sprint planning : The entire scrum team establishes the sprint goal. The developers forecast what work they believe they can accomplish during the sprint to support the goal, and how the chosen work will be completed. Planning should be timeboxed to a maximum of 8 hours for a month-long sprint, with a shorter timebox for shorter sprints. Based on the sprint goal and the forecast, an initial plan is also created. The scrum team may invite other people to sprint planning to provide advice or input on relevant work.
• Daily scrum : During daily scrum, the developers inspect the progress toward the sprint goal and adapt plans as necessary. It's a brief daily event led by the developers to inspect and adapt. It is timeboxed to 15 minutes. Daily scrum is not the team's only opportunity to adapt their plans; they often communicate about needed pivots outside of this event. In daily scrum, the team may synchronize their daily work, identify blockers, and discuss collaboration that needs to take place. Daily scrum helps the team understand if their latest plans will get them closer to achieving the sprint goal and they pivot if needed. 
• Sprint review : The entire scrum team inspects the sprint's outcome with stakeholders and determines future adaptations. Stakeholders are invited to provide feedback on what that scrum team has achieved so far and on the future direction of product development. The product backlog is adapted based on these conversations.
• Sprint retrospective : The conclusion of the sprint, the retrospective is the team's opportunity to inspect their own interactions, collaborations, processes, tools, and any other factors they deem relevant to their ability to continuously improve.

Product backlog refinement

Refinement is a continuous activity used to prepare product backlog items for the upcoming sprint plannings. Teams may adjust details such as description, order, and size. It is not a scrum event. Some teams prefer a recurring meeting, usually done once or twice per sprint. Other teams prefer to refine backlog items as needed. 

While the product owner is ultimately accountable for the state and the content of the product backlog, they can delegate product backlog management to others (but cannot delegate the accountability). The buck stops with the product owner.

Scrum artifacts

Scrum artifacts enable transparency, inspection, and adaptation. They provide visibility into the work being completed so that anyone—the team, stakeholders, managers, etc.—can inspect the results and identify areas where an adaptation may benefit the product.

• Product backlog : An ordered or ranked list of everything that might be needed to improve the product, along with the product goal. The product goal is the commitment to the product backlog and is part of the product backlog.
• Sprint backlog : It consists of the sprint goal plus the set of product backlog items the product owner and developers have forecasted they can complete during the current sprint (they may not finish them all), plus a plan for delivering the increment and achieving the sprint goal. The sprint goal is the commitment for the sprint backlog and does not change during the sprint (while the “scope of work” may actually change). As the plan changes (during the sprint or during daily scrum) those changes are reflected on the sprint backlog. 
• Increment: When a product backlog Item is completed (as per the quality attributes defined for the product - captured usually in the Definition of Done) in such a way that it delivers value and is usable, it becomes an "Increment." Each increment is additive because it does not break what has been previously completed and will continue to work indefinitely into the future when new PBIs are completed. The commitment to the increment is the definition of done.

Scrum artifact commitments

In the scrum framework, each artifact is accompanied by a specific commitment that ensures the work focuses on delivering quality and value. 

• Definition of Done for the increments : The Definition of Done establishes the quality measures for the product that the product backlog items must meet to be considered complete. Once a product backlog item meets the definition of done, it becomes an increment. 
• Sprint goal for the sprint backlog: A specific and singular goal for the sprint that clarifies the sprint's purpose. The sprint goal is the commitment to the sprint backlog. This goal helps everyone focus on the essence of what needs to be done and why. The sprint goal must allow the developers to be flexible about the exact "scope" of work that is done. The sprint goal brings cohesion to the work done during the sprint. 
• Product goal for the product backlog : A clear understanding of the product's overarching objective is essential for teams to effectively organize the work.The product may have multiple product goals over its lifetime, but only one at a time.

How it all works together

Scrum accountabilities, artifacts, and events work together within the sprint. The product owner defines the direction of product development with a product goal using information from stakeholders and users. They identify and define pieces of value that can be delivered to move closer toward the product goal.

The product owner ensures that the product backlog is ordered so that the team knows what is most important. The developers can help the product owner further refine what needs to be done, and the product owner may rely on the developers to make trade-off decisions. This is where refinement becomes an important practice for the scrum team.

Getting started

While the framework defines the bare essentials, here are some considerations to get started:

• Define the "product" and the "boundary" of the product
• Form new scrum teams
• Define product goal and a few product backlog items 
• Create a definition of done

During sprint planning, the scrum team collaborates to create the sprint goal. Based on the sprint goal, the developers pull work (usually from the top) of the product backlog and decide how they will complete it. The team has a set time frame, the sprint, to achieve the sprint goal. They meet at the daily scrum to inspect progress towards the sprint goal and plan for the upcoming day. Along the way, the scrum master keeps the team focused on the sprint goal and can help the team improve as a whole. 

Wrapping up the sprint

The scrum team shares its sprint results with stakeholders in sprint review. They may adapt the product backlog as part of that review and in sprint planning. 

The team has a sprint retrospective to discuss what went well and what didn't go well during the sprint. They may discuss collaborations, tools, communication, and practices that supported or hindered their ability to achieve their sprint goal. They develop action items based on what they discussed in order to improve future sprints.

In sprint planning, the team chooses the product backlog items for the next sprint and the cycle repeats. 

Transitioning to an agile framework such as scrum requires a new mindset and overall cultural adjustments. And, like all change, it doesn't come easy. But when teams and organizations fully commit to scrum, they'll discover a new sense of flexibility, creativity, and inspiration—all of which will lead to greater results.

The scrum value of commitment is essential for building an agile culture. Scrum teams work together to support each other in their pursuit of the product goal and sprint goals. This means that scrum teams trust each other to follow through on what they say they are going to do. When team members aren’t sure how work is going, they ask. Scrum teams only agree to take on tasks they believe they can complete, so they are careful not to overcommit.

Courage 

The scrum value of courage is critical to a scrum team’s success. Scrum teams must feel safe enough to say no, ask for help, and try new things. Agile teams must be brave enough to question the status quo when it hampers their ability to succeed.

Focus 

Every member of the scrum team focuses on the work at hand to support the sprint goal.

Openness 

Scrum teams consistently seek out new ideas and opportunities to learn. Scrum teams are also honest when they need help and open with their team and stakeholders about the challenges they face.

Scrum team members demonstrate respect to one another, to the product owner, to stakeholders, and to the scrum master. Scrum teams know that their strength lies in how well they collaborate and that everyone has a distinct contribution to make toward completing the work of the sprint. They respect each other's ideas, give each other permission to have a bad day once in a while, and recognize each other's accomplishments.

Scrum operates on core elements that make it exceptionally suited for handling complex, evolving projects. This framework facilitates a balance between structure and adaptability, enabling teams to efficiently tackle changing demands and deliver quality outcomes. Through its elements, scrum provides a lightweight set of enabling constraints for teams to follow as they work through uncertainties and aim for continuous improvement in their work.

The three pillars of empirical process control

Scrum is based on the theory of empirical process control, which relies on transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

Transparency

Effective decision-making requires transparency of the process and of the product's progress and a shared language among participants to ensure everyone understands what they're seeing. 

The five scrum events provide appropriate opportunities for transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

Regular inspections of ongoing work are essential for maintaining the intended process and achieving the desired outcome. Integrating these inspections seamlessly into the workflow prevents any disruption. 

Sprint review and sprint planning offer an opportunity to inspect progress toward the product goal, and retrospectives offer opportunities for the team to inspect their teamwork, collaborations, and processes. This process promotes continuous improvement while ensuring progress continues unhindered.

Adaptation involves making timely adjustments to the process or product whenever deviations arise. Scrum teams have the flexibility to adapt the product backlog, product, and their future plans every sprint. This ensures that any necessary changes can be implemented as rapidly as the balance of demands and capacity allows.

Iterative and incremental product management

Scrum combines iterative and incremental approaches.

Iterative 

In an iterative process, teams repeatedly cycle through rounds of delivery to arrive at a desired outcome. Each iteration brings the team closer to its goal, allowing for adjustments based on learning and feedback. This cycle of iterative improvement is a key characteristic of scrum, allowing teams to systematically make progress with each iteration.

Incremental

Incremental refers to a series of small improvements to an existing product or product line that usually helps maintain or improve its competitive position over time. Incremental innovation is regularly used within the high-technology business by companies that need to continue to improve their products to include new features increasingly desired by consumers. The way scrum teams deliver pieces of functionality into small batches is incremental.

Explore scrum certifications

Scrum Alliance certification courses offer in-depth training by leaders in agile and scrum. Choose from courses that focus on a specific scrum team accountability or an agile skill. Foundational role-based courses like the Certified ScrumMaster and all of the skill-based courses have widely applicable training that you can implement right away, no matter your role.

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DevOps and Security Glossary Terms

Agile methodology - definition & overview, what is agile methodology.

The Agile methodology is a set of techniques, values and principles designed to guide and improve how software development teams work together to deliver new applications and updates. It 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

Key takeaways

• Developing an Agile methodology can help reduce the risk of project failure by collecting frequent feedback from customers helps ensure that new features are consistently meeting customer expectations for quality and value.
• The difference between the Waterfall and Agile methodology is that Waterfall projects are plan-driven while Agile projects are customer-driven.
• The original authors of the Agile Manifesto identified four values central to the Agile Methodology.
• Sumo Logic supports development with the Agile methodology.

Waterfall vs Agile methodology: what's the difference?

The traditional software delivery method is sometimes called the Waterfall method. The Waterfall method is so named because it represents a linear, step-wise approach to software delivery. Just like the water flowing through a Waterfall travels in one direction, the workflow of a Waterfall software development project flows from one step to the next, and each step must be completed before the next one can begin. The process flow for the traditional software delivery method can be described in eight steps:

• Identify a business need or opportunity
• Gather and document software requirements
• Software and architecture design
• Coding and unit testing
• System testing
• User acceptance testing
• Final delivery

In the Waterfall method, customers are involved only in the initial stage of development. Project leaders work with customers to capture their needs, then go off and build the entire product before returning it to the customers for user acceptance testing.

In contrast to the traditional Waterfall method, the Agile methodology takes an iterative and customer-focused approach to software development. Its goal is to deliver completed functional code units as frequently as possible.

Development teams using the Agile method usually do not build apps with traditional monolithic architecture. Instead, the agile process powers feature-driven development. Projects are divided into function units of code known as features or microservices, and the project schedule is divided into sprints. The goal of a sprint is to complete the entire delivery process for a single feature. In each sprint, developers will gather needs for that specific feature, design and code the feature, test it, get feedback from customers and test for errors before finalizing the code.

Steps of the Agile Development Methodology

1. Define the project scope and product requirements. 2. Create a product backlog with all the necessary features and user stories. 3. Plan the sprint by selecting user stories to work on. 4. Conduct daily stand-up meetings to track progress and address any issues. 5. Develop the features and functionalities in short iterations or sprints. 6. Test the developed features to ensure they meet the acceptance criteria. 7. Review the progress with stakeholders and gather feedback for continuous improvement. 8. Repeat the process for each sprint, incorporating feedback and making necessary adjustments. 9. Conduct a sprint retrospective to reflect on the successes and areas for improvement. 10. Continue iterating on the product until the desired outcome is achieved.

Four values of the Agile methodology

The original authors of the Agile Manifesto identified four values central to Agile Methodology. It is worth considering how each of these values is reflected in the Agile methodology today:

This first Agile principle reflects an important belief shared by the founders of Agile: software problems are solved by teams of individuals interacting with each other, not by processes and tools. The Agile methodology encourages software engineering to work in teams, program in pairs, meet daily and interact with each other regularly as needs arise to solve problems.

Founders of the Agile methodology were frustrated that the Waterfall method would require them to write hundreds of pages of technical documentation for applications that nobody would ever read. The Agile methodology does not discourage the documentation of code wholesale, but it does encourage development teams to minimize their wasted effort by only producing documentation that drives value, especially by writing tests for the system that document its behavior.

The Waterfall method encourages a contract negotiation model where software development firms enter into fixed-price contracts with the entire scope of work negotiated upfront. Changing requirements to the scope of work is discouraged, as it means modifying the original contract. Agile software delivery favors a "time and materials" or non-fixed funding structure that helps align customer and developer incentives and promote quality.

Adaptive software development In the Waterfall delivery method, software developers deliver projects based on requirements and scope of work that are effectively set in stone at the project's outset. There is little or no opportunity to collect customer feedback throughout the design and code development process, so building applications according to the customer's exact requirements is imperative. In the Agile methodology, frequent customer feedback drives user satisfaction by ensuring that development teams deliver work that meets user needs, even as they change.

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What is the role of a product owner in agile software development?

In agile software development, the product owner plays a crucial role as the key stakeholder, representing the voice of the customer or end-user. They are responsible for defining and prioritizing the product's features, managing the product backlog and ensuring the development team delivers value with each iteration. The product owner works closely with the development team to communicate requirements, provide clarifications and make decisions to maximize the product's value and success.

What is a user story in agile software development?

A user story in agile project management concisely describes a feature or functionality from an end-user perspective. It typically follows a simple template: "As a [type of user], I want [some goal] so that [some reason]." User stories help with agile planning, identify users' needs, prioritize value-based work, and deliver incremental improvements. They are a lightweight way to capture requirements and guide development, focusing on the user's requirements and expectations rather than technical details. Each user story represents a work that can be completed within a single iteration or sprint.

What are some common challenges development teams face when implementing agile practices?

Some common challenges faced by development teams when implementing agile practices include:

1. Resistance to change from team members accustomed to traditional project management methods. 2. Difficulty adapting to agile development's iterative and flexible nature. 3. Balancing short-term delivery goals with long-term project vision and goals. 4. Ensuring effective communication and collaboration among team members and stakeholders. 5. Managing evolving requirements and scope changes during the development process. 6. Struggling to maintain a sustainable pace of work and avoid burnout. 7. Integrating agile practices with existing organizational structures and processes. 8. Establishing clear roles and responsibilities within the agile team. 9. Addressing skill gaps or training needs for team members transitioning to agile methodologies. 10. Measuring and demonstrating the value and impact of agile practices to stakeholders and leadership.

What is sprint planning?

Sprint planning is a crucial aspect of agile methodology, involving the collaborative process where the development team, product owner and scrum master come together to plan the upcoming sprint. During sprint planning, the team reviews and prioritizes the items from the product backlog, breaks them down into smaller tasks, estimates the effort required and commits to completing them within the sprint duration, typically one to four weeks. Sprint planning aims to create a clear plan of what work will be done during the sprint and establish a shared understanding among team members regarding the scope and objectives. This process helps agile management foster transparency, alignment and accountability within the agile team, ultimately contributing to the successful delivery of valuable working software at the end of the sprint.

How can organizations scale an agile approach?

Scaling agile involves extending agile practices and principles across larger teams or organizations to ensure alignment, collaboration and efficiency in delivering value. Some common approaches to scaling agile include:

1. SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) : It aligns teams around a common mission, establishes clear roles and responsibilities, and promotes coordination and synchronization through various levels of planning. Within SAFe are also Agile Release Trains (ARTs), where multiple agile teams work together on a common cadence to deliver value.

2. LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) : LeSS focuses on scaling Scrum principles to accommodate multiple teams working on a single product. It emphasizes simplicity, transparency and customer-centricity while promoting collaboration, cross-functional teams and shared ownership of product development.

3. Nexus : Builds on Scrum principles to scale agile delivery across multiple Scrum teams working on a single product. It provides additional practices and events to ensure integration, coordination, and alignment between teams while maintaining the core values of Scrum.

4. Disciplined Agile (DA) : Disciplined Agile offers a pragmatic approach to scaling agile by providing a toolkit of processes, practices and guidance, similar to the Scrum guide, that teams can tailor to their specific context. It focuses on flexibility, choice and alignment with organizational structures and project types.

Scaling agile requires structural changes, cultural alignment and continuous improvement.

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• Agile Software Development Methodology | Framework, Principles, and Benefits
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What is Agile Methodology?

• Agile Methodology Advantages and Disadvantages
• Agile System Development
• Difference between Traditional and Agile Software Development
• Difference between Agile and SDLC
• Difference between Agile Model and V-Model
• Difference between Agile and Kanban
• Difference between Agile Testing and V-Model Testing
• Difference between Agile and DevOps
• Agile vs Scrum | Difference between Agile and Scrum in Software Development
• Can Agile be Used Outside of Software Development?
• User Stories in Agile Software Development
• Agile SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle)
• Crystal methods in Agile Development/Framework
• Agile Software Process and it's Principles

The Agile methodology is a project management and software development approach that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and customer-centricity. It is the latest model used by major companies today like Facebook, google, amazon, etc. It follows the iterative as well as incremental approach that emphasizes the importance of delivering of working product very quickly. This article focuses on discussing Agile Methodology in detail.

Table of Content

What is Agile?

What is the agile methodology, history of agile, manifesto for agile software development, agile software development, what is agile project management, agile software testing, agile methodology advantage and disadvantage, agile vs waterfall methodology, life cycle of agile methodology, when to use the agile methodology, agile methodologies vs traditional approaches, benefits of agile methodology, limitations of agile methodology, agile software development interview questions.

Agile is a project management and software development approach that aims to be more effective.

• It focuses on delivering smaller pieces of work regularly instead of one big launch.
• This allows teams to adapt to changes quickly and provide customer value faster.

Agile is not just a methodology; it’s a mindset. Agile isn’t about following specific rituals or techniques. Instead, it’s a bunch of methods that show a dedication to quick feedback and always getting better.

Agile methodologies are iterative and incremental, which means it’s known for breaking a project into smaller parts and adjusting to changing requirements.

• They prioritize flexibility, collaboration, and customer satisfaction.
• Major companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon use Agile because of its adaptability and customer-focused approach.

In 1957, people started figuring out new ways to build computer programs. They wanted to make the process better over time, so they came up with iterative and incremental methods.

In the 1970s, people started using adaptive software development and evolutionary project management. This means they were adjusting and evolving how they built software.

In 1990s, there was a big change. Some people didn’t like the strict and super-planned ways of doing things in software development. They called these old ways “waterfall.” So, in response, lighter and more flexible methods showed up. These included:

• Rapid Application Development (RAD) in 1991.
• Unified Process (UP), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) in 1994.
• Scrum in 1995.
• Crystal Clear and Extreme Programming (XP) in 1996.
• Feature-Driven Development (FDD) in 1997.

Even though these came before the official “Agile Manifesto”, we now call them agile software development methods.

In 2001 , seventeen software developers met at a resort in Snowbird, Utah to discuss lightweight development methods. They were: Kent Beck (Extreme Programming), Ward Cunningham (Extreme Programming), Dave Thomas (PragProg, Ruby), Jeff Sutherland (Scrum), Ken Schwaber (Scrum), Jim Highsmith (Adaptive Software Development), Alistair Cockburn (Crystal), Robert C. Martin (SOLID), Mike Beedle (Scrum), Arie van Bennekum, Martin Fowler (OOAD and UML), James Grenning, Andrew Hunt (PragProg, Ruby), Ron Jeffries (Extreme Programming), Jon Kern, Brian Marick (Ruby, TDD), and Steve Mellor (OOA). They wrote something important called the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. This was a big moment that set the stage for the agile movement.

In 2005, Alistair Cockburn and Jim Highsmith added more ideas about managing projects, creating the PM Declaration of Interdependence.

Then, in 2009, a group, including Robert C. Martin, added principles about software development. They called it the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto, focusing on being professional and skilled.

In 2011, the Agile Alliance, a group of agile enthusiasts, made the Guide to Agile Practices (later called Agile Glossary). This was like a shared document where agile people from around the world put down their ideas, terms, and guidelines. It’s a bit like a dictionary for how to do agile things.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development is a document produced by 17 developers at Snowbird, Utah in 2001. This document consists of 4 Agile Values and 12 Agile Principles. These 12 principals and 4 agile values provide a guide to Software Developers. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development emerged as a transformative guide to  Software Development .

Agile Software Development is a  software development methodology  that values flexibility, collaboration, and customer satisfaction. It is based on the Agile Manifesto, a set of principles for software development that prioritize individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change.

Agile Software Development is an iterative and incremental approach to  software development  that emphasizes the importance of delivering a working product quickly and frequently. It involves close collaboration between the development team and the customer to ensure that the product meets their needs and expectations.

What are Agile frameworks?

Agile frameworks are methods of organizing and dealing with software program development initiatives that follow the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto. Agile frameworks intend to supply value to clients faster and extra often, even also allowing groups to conform to converting requirements and remarks.

Types of Agile Frameworks

• DSDM or Dynamic Systems Development Method ·
• XP or Extreme Programming
• FDD or Feature Driven Development
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

Agile Development Models

The Agile Development Model  was primarily designed to help a project adapt quickly to change requests. So, the main aim of the Agile model is to facilitate quick project completion. To accomplish this task, agility is required. Agility is achieved by fitting the process to the project and removing activities that may not be essential for a specific project. Also, anything that is a waste of time and effort is avoided. 

The Agile Model refers to a group of development processes. These processes share some basic characteristics but do have certain subtle differences among themselves.

Agile Software Development Methodology

Agile Software Development Methodology in software development is an efficient methodology that helps teams produce high-quality software quickly and with flexibility. Agile is not just a methodology; it’s a mindset .  At its core, Agile values individuals and interactions, working solutions, and customer collaboration over strict processes and comprehensive documentation. It acknowledges that the needs and priorities of a project may change, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and continuous improvement.

What is Agile Product Management?

In simple terms, Agile Product Management is a concept and approach that focuses on speed while taking the demands of customers into account throughout the  product development life cycle . As compared to traditional Waterfall approaches, which follow a ‘linear and sequential’ process, Agile uses iterative cycles of operation; developers can return to customers for feedback or modifications constantly. That is a mindset that prioritizes people and interactions over processes and systems, working products over detailed documentation, and customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

Agile Project Management is a revolutionary approach, that is aimed at continuously delivering solutions for the changing requirements of the project in a spiral way.

• It was established by the Agile Manifesto’s principles, calling for iterative and incremental development of the project into manageable sprints that create potentially shippable increments.
• Agile Project Management is the concept of being agile and agile method in the new challenges of advanced projects, concerning its community-oriented spirit, planning flexibility, and ongoing progress.

Agile Testing  is a type of software testing that follows the principles of agile software development to test the software application. All members of the project team along with the special experts and testers are involved in agile testing. Agile testing is not a separate phase and it is carried out with all the development phases i.e. requirements, design and coding, and test case generation.

The main advantage and disadvantage of agile methodology are:

• Advantage : Agile methodologies allow for flexibility and adaptability in responding to changes. Teams can easily adjust their plans and priorities based on evolving requirements or feedback during the project.
• Disadvantage : The iterative and adaptive nature of agile can sometimes lead to uncertainty, especially in projects with unclear or rapidly changing requirements. This may pose challenges in estimating timelines and costs accurately.

Agile is like a good fit for projects that need to be flexible and change a lot, such as making computer programs. It works well when talking with customers and making improvements bit by bit are really important. On the other side, Waterfall is just right for projects that have clear steps and simple, straight-ahead plans. It’s like following a recipe step by step. So, if your project is all about changes and surprises, go for Agile. But if it’s more like following a clear plan without many surprises, Waterfall is the way to go.

The Agile software development life cycle helps you break down each project you take on into six simple stages:

1. Requirement Gathering

• In this stage, the project team identifies and documents the needs and expectations of various stakeholders, including clients, users, and subject matter experts.
• It involves defining the project’s scope, objectives, and requirements.
• Establishing a budget and schedule.
• Creating a project plan and allocating resources.
• Developing a high-level system architecture.
• Creating detailed specifications, which include data structures, algorithms, and interfaces.
• Planning for the software’s user interface.

3. Development (Coding)

Writing the actual code for the software. Conducting unit testing to verify the functionality of individual components.

This phase involves several types of testing:

• Integration Testing: Ensuring that different components work together.
• System Testing: Testing the entire system as a whole.
• User Acceptance Testing: Confirming that the software meets user requirements.
• Performance Testing: Assessing the system’s speed, scalability, and stability.

5. Deployment

• Deploying the software to a production environment.
• Put the software into the real world where people can use it.
• Make sure it works smoothly in the real world.
• Providing training and support for end-users.

6. Review (Maintenance)

• Addressing and resolving any issues that may arise after deployment.
• Releasing updates and patches to enhance the software and address problems.

It is particularly well-suited for projects and organizations where the following conditions or needs are present:

• Unclear or Changing Requirements: Agile is great for projects with requirements that aren’t well-defined or might change.
• Complex Projects: It’s good for big, complex projects by breaking them into smaller pieces.
• Customer Focus: Use Agile when making customers happy is a priority and you want to involve them throughout.
• Quick Time-to-Market: If you need to get your product out fast, Agile can help.
• Small to Medium Teams: Agile works well for teams of a few to a few dozen people.
• Team Skills: It’s best when you have a mix of skills in your team, like development, testing, design, and more.
• Collaboration: Agile promotes working together and open communication.
• Regular Updates: If you want to check progress often and make changes as needed.
• Transparency: Agile emphasizes being open and clear with everyone involved in the project.
• Risk Control: It helps manage risks by tackling issues as they come up.
• Innovation: If you encourage trying new things and learning from experience, Agile supports that.
• Continuous Improvement: Agile fosters a culture of always getting better over time.

The advantages of the agile model are as follows:

• Immediate Feedback: It allows immediate feedback, which aids software improvement in the next increment.
• Adapts to Changing Requirements: It is a highly adaptable methodology in which rapidly changing requirements, allowing responsive adjustments.
• Face-to-Face Communication: Agile methodology encourages effective face-to-face communication.
• Time-Efficient: It is well-suited for its time-efficient practices, which help in delivering software quickly and reducing time-to-market.
• Frequent Changes: It effectively manages and accommodates frequent changes in project requirements according to stakeholder convenience.
• Customer Satisfaction: It prioritizes customer satisfaction.
• Flexibility and Adaptability: Agile methodologies are known for their flexibility and adaptability.

The disadvantages of the agile model are as follows:

• Less Documentation: Agile methodologies focus on less documentation; it prioritizes working on projects rather than paperwork.
• Challenges in Large Organizations: Busy schedule of clients can make daily meetup and face-to-face communication difficult.
• Need for Senior Programmers: It may require experienced programmers to make critical decisions during the development of software.
• Limited Scope Control: It has less rigid scope control, which may not be suitable in certain situations.
• Predictability : Compared to more structured project management methods, it may lack predictability.

Popular Agile Tools for Software Development

An Agile Tool for software development is a software application or a platform that enables the teams to manage and track the Agile project more efficiently.

Some popular agile tools are:

In this article on ‘Agile Software Development Interview Questions,’ we will look at key features of Agile methodology and ask questions that will help you land the job you want in this exciting and in-demand industry.

In conclusion, the Agile model is like building a project in small, flexible steps. It’s about being quick to adapt, working closely with customers, and delivering value in small doses. This approach has become popular for many companies because it helps them meet changing needs and make customers happy.

Use the Agile model when your project needs to be flexible, your customers’ needs might change, and you want to deliver small parts of your project regularly to make them happy. It’s like building a puzzle piece by piece, adapting as needed.

1. What is Agile Methodology?

Agile methodology is the type of methodology in which a user can see something quickly. It is the iterative as well as its incremental process. It prioritizes user collaboration, responding to change and delivering the software product in short time.

2. How does Agile Methodology work?

Agile breaks the project into smaller modules, each module will be maintained by team members and deliver those modules in a shorter time to the customer. This allows a regular feedback loop.

3. What are the benefits of the Agile Methodology?

Customer satisfaction, time to market early, flexibility, change to freedom and team collaboration are some benefits of Agile Methodology.

4. Is Agile Methodology being suitable for all the projects?

Agile methodology is well-suited for the projects in which requirements are unclear and keep changing according to stakeholder convenience.

5. What is the framework of Agile Methodology?

The framework of the Agile Methodology is Scrum, Lean, Kanban and Extreme Programming and more. These provides rules and guidelines for the implementing the Agile Methodology in different ways.

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Agile explained: The 4 Agile Manifesto values and 12 principles

Editor’s note : This article was last updated on 29 December 2022.

The Agile Manifesto marked the birth of Agile, a professional worldview that has sparked innovation in ways the authors didn’t expect and reached far beyond the world of software.

The Agile Manifesto specifies four values and 12 principles that guide efficient software product development.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll introduce you to the concept of Agile product development and then break down the Agile Manifesto with a focus on its four values and 12 principles.

Before we get into the history of the Agile Manifesto and a detailed breakdown of how its tenets are implemented in practice, let’s quickly review its values and principles:

What are the 4 Agile Manifesto values?

The four values of the Agile Manifesto are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

What are the 12 Agile Manifesto principles?

The 12 principles of agile software development as outlined in the Agile Manifesto are as follows:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

• Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Click through the jump links above (or just keep scrolling) to learn more about what each of the 12 Agile principles means in practice and how to apply it in your organization. Many of these principles intertwine, so expect to see a lot of overlap.

What is Agile?

Agile is a mindset and philosophy around building products that espouses collaboration, customer-centricity, and expecting and responding to change.

A common misconception is that agile is about development speed or velocity; it isn’t. Also counter to popular belief, agile is neither a methodology nor a framework. These labels are reserved for more specific and prescriptive agile models.

For instance, scrum is an example of a popular agile “framework”  —  a set of instructions for putting the agile values and principles into practice. Thought leaders and consultancies create many agile models. These frameworks should not be confused with Agile itself.

What is the Agile Manifesto?

The Agile Manifesto is a short, 68-word statement that establishes a broad system of purpose and values for meaningful, efficient, continuous software development:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: 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.

Don’t let the statement’s brevity fool you; these words pack a punch. The Agile Manifesto has changed the tech world and impacted how teams work across all industries,  not only software.

A brief history

The Agile Manifesto established the concept of agile product development. The brief but bold declaration was written and signed in 2001 by 17 seasoned software engineers, some of whom have been writing code since the 1960s and ’70s. The machines and programming languages available at the time were as slow as the businesses they supported. Computers served elite science use cases more than business.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, waterfall , or “heavyweight,” practices dominated product development, where the emphasis was placed on upfront planning and documentation. Entering the new millennium, these experts had been collaborating on what were called at the time “lightweight” software development practices.

Popular lightweight frameworks of the 1990s were Crystal, Extreme Programming, and scrum , the most popular framework today. The creators of these leading frameworks and others were all signatories of the Agile Manifesto.

Today, agile is the standard. It all started with the Agile Manifesto.

Breaking down the Agile Manifesto

The Agile Manifesto consists of a simple preamble, four values, and one clarifying sentence. Let’s dig into each element and unpack what it means in more detail.

Preamble: Continuous learning is critical

The first sentence of the Agile Manifesto is the most overlooked and understated. Though seemingly insignificant, the signers have said this preamble actually took a considerable amount of time to write .

People often reference the four values without considering the introduction, but it’s important to establish a philosophy of constant change and improvement as well as generosity:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Let’s get even more granular and zoom in on the first five words of the Agile Manifesto: “We are uncovering better ways….”

To embrace the Agile Manifesto means to commit to continuous improvement  — in other words,  to be joyfully and perpetually dissatisfied. From there, we should remember how much the discoveries of others have helped us. Share learnings; there are always new learnings to be had.

I’ve seen this play out in sprint retrospectives , postmortems, manager and/or peer feedback, evolving processes, and definitions of done (DoDs) — sharing learnings and listening to the understandings of others is crucial to any agile project. If you look around and see a lot of process that has gone unchanged for some time, you probably haven’t been “uncovering better ways.”

The world changes and life changes. To be agile means to embrace change and continuous learning .

The twist at the end

Throughout the four value statements, it can be easy to forget that none of these things are bad. The point of an even over statement is that one part is good, but the other is even better.

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Before we dig into the four values, let’s skip to the bit at the end, where the Agile Manifesto tells us how to read the values correctly. This is also important but often forgotten:

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

As we review the four Agile Manifesto values, we should recognize that the right side is good, but the left is even more valuable.

The 4 agile values

The 4 values as stipulated in the Agile Manifesto are as follows.

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

To be agile means to be all-in on people. The first value of the Agile Manifesto might be the most ahead of its time. The authors knew that people mattered and collaboration was essential.

We can infer more about the intention here by looking at the 12 Agile Principles, which are an elaboration of the fundamental values.

Of the 12 Agile Principles, at least six involve human relationships:

• Principle No. 4 establishes a new kind of relationship where “business people and developers must work together daily”
• Principle No. 5 says to “build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need”
• Principle No. 6 asserts that “face-to-face conversation” is the best way to communicate
• Principle No. 8 introduces the symbiotic relationship between “sponsors, developers, and users”
• Principle No. 11 claims the best deliverables come from “self-organizing teams”
• Principle No. 12 encourages teams to “[reflect] on how to become more effective” and adjust accordingly

It’s critical to remember how these even over statements should be interpreted. The right side of the statement (processes and tools) is valuable. However, individuals and interactions are more valuable. To rephrase this first Agile Manifesto value, we might say, “Processes and tools are good, but individuals and their interactions are even more important.”

In the real world, I’ve seen this play out in cross-functional squads made up of product , engineering , design , quality assurance , data analytics , and even marketing stakeholders  —  working day after day, in a single team, on a customer problem.

2. Working software over comprehensive documentation

While the first Agile Manifesto value is probably the most foundational of the four, the second value might be the most controversial today. The emphasis on “working software” often alarms modern tech professionals. What is so great about software that only “works?”

I have a friend who is a product manager at a large company. While developing their product, they spent up to a year digging into user research and discussing customer insights without shipping anything to the customer. In the end, they produced a small, insignificant feature that didn’t meet any real customer need.

So in cases like these, everyone wants to be a philosopher and empathize with customers, but no one can actually deliver.

Getting a minimum viable product (MVP) out now is better than getting a “perfect” product out much later. Of course, a “working” product is not the end goal, but it is required for delivering value to customers and businesses. If we’re not shipping, then what are we actually accomplishing?

Comprehensive documentation is good, according to the Agile Manifesto. This is how the even over statements work. For example, the second value could be rephrased as, “Documentation is good, but delivering working software is even more important.” A product with no documentation is preferable to having documentation and no product.

3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

In the third Agile Manifesto value, the reference to “contract negotiation” tends to perplex some readers. Keep in mind that the right side of the statement is still valuable, so contract negotiation is good. But what is this contract negotiation that we’re talking about?

Contract negotiation refers to any agreements involved in the work, internally or externally. Yes, this includes any political dealings and vendor paperwork, but there’s more to it than that. Many agile professionals would interpret contract negotiations to also include deadlines , budget agreements, and scope agreements with internal stakeholders or customers.

A modern paraphrase might be, “Business commitments are good, but the voice of the customer should come first.”

I’ve seen agile teams live out this value by prioritizing research and discovery work ahead of execution to ensure the right solution is built. I’ve seen granular Gantt charts replaced with quarterly and monthly Gantt charts or higher-level Now-Next-Later roadmaps .

4. Responding to change over following a plan

The fourth and final Agile Manifesto value asserts that following a plan is good, but responding to change is even more valuable.

Before the lightweight frameworks of the 1980s and ’90s, organizations might’ve spent years planning a solution, then years building the solution. By the time the original solution was ready, the problem had evolved enough to render the solution useless. These types of experiences and observations led engineers to seek better ways of developing software.

A well-known quote from former U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower comes to mind: “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” The point is that plans are good to work on, but they should always consider the constant uncertainty surrounding them. Plans are only as good as their flexibility.

The 12 agile principles

To review and for quick reference, the 12 Agile Manifesto principles (in shorthand) are as follows.

1. Satisfy the customer

What does it mean.

As agile professionals, we believe in relieving customer pain by delivering valuable products and features quickly and regularly. Why? We can get feedback faster to improve and increase value to customers — and because we know that we never get it entirely right the first time.

How to apply Agile principle No. 1

• Focus on customers’ problems
• Build minimum viable products
• Operate with minimum valuable processes
• Foster a culture of learning and iteration in your team

2. Welcome changing requirements

Embrace uncertainty. The environment is constantly changing, and change is something we can use to our advantage. To be competitive, not only should we anticipate change, but we should welcome it.

How to apply Agile principle No. 2

• Update sprint goals mid-sprint more frequently
• Set the tone for others by not being surprised when needs change
• Celebrate when your team pivots
• Use continuous discovery habits to stay in tune with customer problems and the market

3. Deliver working software frequently

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference for the shorter timescale.

Take baby steps. There are multiple advantages to releasing more minor product updates more frequently. Shipping smaller increments regularly and being able to deploy quickly mitigates risk. Additionally, you can add value to the business by delivering more frequently and learning faster.

How to apply Agile principle No. 3

• Test how quickly your team can get a change live by making small changes (e.g., a comment in some code). This will help you gauge where you are and optimize your ability to respond to change
• Break up stories into smaller pieces. Need some inspiration? Consider what it might look like to only have one-point stories or only stories that can be delivered within a day

4. Work together daily

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Who is included in “business people?” I interpret this phrase to refer to anyone not on the tech teams — e.g., product, design, marketing stakeholders, etc. Of course, it depends on the organization, project, or outcome you hope to achieve.

No matter who is involved, transparency and collaboration should be day-to-day normalcy.

How to apply Agile principle No. 4

• Consider inviting other stakeholders to team meetings while managing expectations on roles and responsibilities as necessary
• Make planning and roadmap artifacts more accessible so others can follow along with progress and ask questions or provide feedback
• Create a visual of the team but include colleagues who might not technically be on the same team according to the official org chart
• Use an open Slack channel (or chat tool of choice) instead of keeping it private

5. Build projects around motivated individuals

There are a lot of words packed in the fifth agile principle: motivation, environment, support, trust — with individual people at the center of it all.

A supportive environment will mean different things to different people. It comes down to knowing your team and how to communicate with and support the individuals within it.

How to apply Agile principle No. 5

You might find this principle the most challenging because it cannot be isolated to a specific level in an organization. For example, as a product manager, your hands might be tied in many ways.

That said, some things are always within your control. To improve the work environment as a manager, you can:

• Make work fun (whatever that means to you and your team)
• Treat people as individuals and get to know them personally
• Celebrate wins, big and small
• Establish a compelling vision for your product or program

6. Communicate face-to-face

Video conferencing tools have made “face-to-face” conversations more effortless than ever, but they still don’t entirely replace in-person interaction.

At the same time, there are many advantages to remote work , so the takeaway isn’t that teams must be colocated, either.

How to apply Agile principle No. 6

• Turn your video on
• Meet in person from time to time
• Don’t be shy to jump on a quick call to hash something out in real time (using Slack’s huddle feature, for example)
• When using text, sprinkle in emoji reactions to avoid any confusion about your tone

7. Measure progress by working products

Basically, it means to cut through the BS. The seventh agile principle stipulates that working software is the “ primary measure of progress,” but some folks get alarmed because they read “ only measure of progress” instead.

This principle can feel out of touch in a world where we value customer problem statements , fancy visual frameworks , user research , market research , analytics , and anthropology.

While these factors are important, what good are they if we aren’t getting any tools out into the wild to help customers in real life?

How to apply Agile principle No. 7

• Document and plan as you go
• Prioritize building things that will help customers now
• Double down on agile principle No. 1
• Apply healthy pressure to teams by asking, “Have we actually helped customers lately?”

8. Maintain a constant pace indefinitely (marathons, not sprints)

Agility means that burnouts, late nights, and last-minute emergencies should be rare. The cross-functional team should plan to move at a sustainable rate. This can be supported by adopting the other agile principles, as well.

How to apply Agile principle No. 8

A common mistake people make when reading the eighth principle is to misinterpret the word “pace.” Most often, “maintaining a constant pace” means the team should slow down, not speed up. Plan ahead and put systems in place that make it normal to react to change.

9. Pay continuous attention to technical excellence

You should take pride in your craftsmanship. Vince Lombardi, famed NFL head coach for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named, once said, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”

The ninth agile principle doesn’t aim for perfection; we should acknowledge that excellence in the tech world is a rapidly moving target and to hit it requires “continuous attention.”

How to apply Agile principle No. 9

• Host lunch-and-learns and “brown bag” educational opportunities
• Build in time to incorporate tech debt into sprints
• Foster a culture in which team members are encouraged to maintain quality and sustainable implementations for longer-term agility

10. Keep it simple

Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.

This phrase might seem counterintuitive at first glance and often strikes people as odd or unnecessarily confusing, but it’s actually pretty profound. Basically, it means less is more.

Maximizing the amount of work not done calls for a mental shift from doing more to doing less. Essentially, this means that you spend more time doing only what is necessary and waste less time complicating your processes.

How to apply Agile principle No. 10

• Understand the reason and the vision for what you’re working on
• Think about what is really needed. Consider a light framework, such as MoSCoW or Needs vs. Nice-to-Haves
• Determine the simplest solution to the problem and consider the tradeoffs

11. Trust your team to self-organize

The best work comes out of teams that are allowed to plan and execute among themselves.

Principle no. 11 is not about anarchy or some progressive operating model where people form their own clans and do whatever they want — remember, this statement was written in 2001.

The point of the 11th agile principle is that motivated and supported individuals are trusted and allowed to immerse themselves in a problem space and come up with the best solution.

Trust doesn’t just magically emerge, of course, so this advice is sometimes easier said than done.

How to apply Agile principle No. 11

• Create organizations of teams that are motivated and empowered. Train those teams on framing problems and divergent and convergent thinking
• Create teams that are cross-functional to minimize dependencies
• Reflect on how teams are measured and what behavior this encourages

12. Reflect and adapt

How to apply agile principle no. 12.

The first mistake teams often make is running sprint retrospectives that are too predictable and too formal . Notice this agile principle makes no mention of a time frame; there’s no name or structure for this team reflection.

The second mistake (which often stems from the first) is a lack of accountability; too often, there is no follow-up or tracking of action items. I don’t believe every observation in a retrospective-like conversation needs to have an action item. However, when action items are defined, you should establish some accountability to ensure that progress is made.

How to apply this principle

• Check in regularly with your team and colleagues
• Track next steps when necessary
• Have fun and be genuine

What the 12 Agile principles are not

Now that you have seen and understand what all 12 Agile Manifesto principles are, let’s review what they are not .

The agile principles are not a methodology or part of a methodology. The principles aren’t really a framework, either. In the Agile world, frameworks are the more prescriptive sets of rules, systems, and processes to help teams put the agile principles into action.

The agile principles are statements that add more color to the higher-level values of the Agile Manifesto. They are the specific stances of professionals who value continuous learning and improvement in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Is the Agile Manifesto still relevant today?

I believe the Agile Manifesto has aged quite well, all things considered. It is still a set of values that offers a healthy challenge for tech and business professionals alike.

Not only does the Agile Manifesto remain helpful, but many other industries outside of software development have adopted it. Simply tweaking a few references to “software” has gone a long way toward helping marketing teams, human resources, and many others to deliver valuable outcomes more efficiently.

Despite dozens of Agile Manifesto alternatives , extensions, and calls for complete replacement , the general consensus is that the document has stood the test of time remarkably well. Arguments from critics are often misguided, unconvincing, or just not adding enough value to get widespread attention. There is so much content out there now, a new Agile Manifesto would need to be revolutionary to get traction.

Agile Manifesto TL;DR summary

To summarize the key takeaways from this Agile Manifesto guide:

• The preamble, which is the most overlooked part of the manifesto, encourages continually “uncovering better ways” and “helping others” along the way
• Value No. 1 is the most ahead of its time and places people, collaboration, inclusion, and relationships at the center of Agile. To paraphrase this value for modern software development: Processes and tools are valuable, but people and relationships are even more important
• Value No. 2 is the most controversial today because it espouses “working software over comprehensive documentation.” Modern paraphrase: Robust documentation is good, but actually delivering solutions is better
• Value No. 3 is the most misunderstood due to “contract negotiation” and vagueness around “customer.” Modern paraphrase: Commitments are good, but building the right thing is better
• Value No. 4 is the heart of Agile: “Responding to change over following a plan”

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One Reply to "Agile explained: The 4 Agile Manifesto values and 12 principles"

You’ve written this guide beautifully. “Joyfully & perpetually dissatisfied should be trademarked. Thank you.

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Agile vs Scrum

Agile vs scrum. how to choose the best methodology for you.

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You’ll often hear a colleague or teammate excited to share how they’ve “gone agile.” They’ll then go on to describe their two-week sprints, backlog refinement meetings , and more. This may leave you thinking, “that sounds like scrum to me.” So, is Scrum agile? Is Agile scrum? Answering these questions and more is a great first step to ensure your team is using the right methodology. 

What is agile?

Agile is a project management philosophy that employs a set of principles and values to help software teams respond to change. Agile teams value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. These values were set down in the Agile Manifesto along with 12 principles behind the manifesto. 

A good way to understand agile is to contrast it with another project management philosophy, waterfall. In waterfall delivery, the scope of a product is set and time and resources are flexible. Waterfall organizations will add more programmers and pad schedules to deliver the product that they decided to ship. 

In agile, the scope of the product is flexible while resources and time are fixed. Agile teams commit to deliver software on time with the team they have today. What they deliver is a flexible combination of what they’ve learned that the customer wants and what they can create in the allotted time.

Benefits of using agile

Agile teams have a strong “why” behind what they do and clarity about how they do it. The agile principles help teams break huge, ambitious goals into manageable chunks of work that they can consistently deliver. Agile software developers are empowered by countless stories of small, agile teams outperforming large competitors that use waterfall delivery. Agile teams also benefit from the “agile industrial complex.” There is a wealth of resources and tools for those needing to learn agile and a whole army of consultants eager to help with implementation. 

Disadvantages of using agile

Following agile principles can lead you to places you never thought you’d go. Agile helps teams change direction based on market and customer feedback. Chasing these ideals, you might find that your team has built something completely different than what you set out to do. This can be an unnerving feeling and you might even feel a lack of direction as you pursue new avenues and follow customer feedback in new directions. Because of these divergent outcomes, not all teams and companies can work in an agile way. But the teams that choose to overcome these hurdles often find they can ship a better product to their customers in the end. 

What is scrum?

Scrum is an agile framework that helps teams structure their work into short development cycles called sprints . Scrum teams commit to shipping work at the end of each sprint and adopt practices and a team structure that helps them achieve this cadence. Scrum takes the agile principles one step further, creating structure that helps teams live the agile principles in their day-to-day work. Scrum is a well-documented agile framework that many teams can adopt without much disruption. 

Benefits of using the scrum methodology

Scrum teams ship software on time. Rather than updating the business on your progress, you can show them! When you ship software, customers start using it. More customer usage data helps inform your direction and drives growth. Scrum teams also tend to be healthier, with less burnout and churn than others. This is because scrum practices, like sprint planning and sprint retrospectives, are focused on setting up teammates for success.

Disadvantages of using the scrum methodology

Scrum is an “all-in” approach. Success stems from the addition of new roles, like a scrum master , and the refactoring of everybody's schedules around a set meeting cadence. Many teams don’t have the resources to hire new teammates and the time for new meetings. When teams fail to go “all-in” they often fail to unlock the benefits of scrum. Additionally, not all teams can deliver work at such a high cadence. When quality suffers as a result, many teams make their sprints longer and longer. Eventually, you’re back to doing waterfall! 

Other methodologies: Kanban and Waterfall

What is kanban.

Kanban is an agile framework that helps teams deliver work on a continuous basis. Kanban teams organize their work on a kanban board with cards, columns, WIP limits, and specific commitment and delivery points. Kanban is best for knowledge work, where the product or service is largely invisible. Kanban helps teams visualize their and make strides day after day. 

What is waterfall?

Waterfall delivery is focused on the development of products or solutions based on specifications from the client or business. Teams study the requirements and build the solution over weeks, months, or even years. Waterfall is the preferred method in regulated industries where tolerances are very narrow. 

Imagine you are making a surgery robot that needs to perform a task flawlessly for a government-mandated 100 hours of operation. That constraint inspires your work and that specification becomes the focus of your development. Your team experiments and tests until your robot meets the specifications. When specifications are specific and stringent, waterfall development focuses your team on meeting the requirements above all else.

What is the best methodology for your team?

If you’re excited to begin an agile transformation you may need to choose a methodology. Agile methodologies include the team structure, practices, and tools you’d need for your org to live the agile principles. You can also step out on your own. With the agile manifesto and some creativity, you can design your own approach that works for your business and your team. 

Agile doesn’t have any set rules, while scrum has quite a few! If you are seeking a framework that can guide you on your way to more agility, choosing scrum is a strong start. Scrum will help energize your team to deliver work quickly and to pivot when needed. Additionally, there are templates you can adopt today to supercharge your scrum adoption.  If you are seeking the ultimate flexibility, you can instead inspire your team to go agile. An agile transformation is the thrilling process of breaking down what you do now and building up an agile way of working.

Agile vs waterfall

It’s uncommon that you’d find yourself needing to choose between agile and waterfall. It’s more common that you’re needing to pivot from one to the other. In moments like these, the customer is key. Is the customer more solution focused or problem focused? If a customer knows what they want and wants to pay someone to build it, you can lean towards waterfall. If the customer is experiencing a problem and you want to be the one to solve it, agile all the way. 

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AGILE ESSENTIALS

The 12 principles behind the agile manifesto.

Below are the guiding practices that support teams in implementing and executing with agility.

The following 12 Principles are based on the  Agile Manifesto .

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

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Tutorial Playlist

Agile scrum tutorial: a step-by-step guide for beginners, what is agile: understanding agile methodology and principles in software development, what is scrum a guide to get you started, understanding agile process: everything you need to know, an introduction to the world of user stories, agile vs waterfall: choosing the best methodology.

Agile vs Scrum: The Differences You Need To Know

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How to Become a Scrum Master: A Step-by-Step Guide

Top 50+ Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers for 2024

Top 60+ agile interview questions and answers for 2024.

Lesson 1 of 10 By Simplilearn

Table of Contents

Agile methodology is a project management approach that allows successful and efficient execution of the project while emphasizing the improvement of a project and team collaboration. The approach is applicable in software development for flexibility, customer satisfaction, and collaboration. It refers to the application of a set of principles that functions through an interactive and incremental approach. The Agile methodology in software development emphasizes the importance of team collaboration and delivering a working product quickly to meet customer needs and expectations. 

Agile vs Waterfall? Learn the Difference from CSTs

How does the Agile Software Development Process Work? 

The Agile software development process is a set of steps to be performed in order. The importance of sequence is as follows: 

Requirements: The companies here gather information on customer’s requirements and prioritize them based on different factors. It is an initial factor to understand the direction of the project and progress. 

Planning: Developing a plan is an essential part of delivering the complete software comprising all the features. The plan includes time for the development and delivery of each iteration. 

Development: The software development is carried out by the development team while using frequent and rapid iterations. 

Testing: It involves software testing to make sure it meets the quality delivered by the organization and expected by the customer 

Deployment: Here, the organization serves the ultimate aim, which is to allow usage of the software. 

Maintenance: The software is regularly maintained to ensure customers' needs and expectations are met.

Core Principles of Agile Software Development Methodology

• Achieving customer satisfaction by timely and regular delivery fitting the customer requirements 
• Delivering working software with minimal or no errors 
• Earning a competitive edge by adapting to the changes in the market 
• Sticking to the shortest time delivery with quality 
• Including motivated and passionate individuals in building and developing the project
• Accepting change in requirements and deliveries despite nearness to delivery date 
• Choosing the face-to-face communication method for efficient and effective information disbursal 
• Embracing excellence while estimating and improving the progress 

Become a Skilled Agile Professional

Key Agile Development Concepts

The key concepts of Agile development and Agile software development are: 

Adaptability 

The changing demands and development process require adaptability in the project. It helps the team and project get back on track, increases the team’s confidence, saves time, and decreases productivity due to mess. It also allows changing the path of development and deployment to deliver the results timely. 

Disruption 

Agile methodology encourages changes to deliver quality results and improve customer satisfaction. It includes changing priorities, culture, and goals. Though the changes are hard and unacceptable, management on collective agreement becomes easier while providing better results. 

Collaboration 

It is another valued key Agile concept that contributes to building trust and accountability. It helps bring different ideas and collective discussion to improve poor but potentially holding ideas. 

Iterative Developments 

Rework for improvements is a common thing in software development. The iterative process here follows a continuous and close feedback loop for improvement. It is the core concept in Agile development. 

Incremental Development 

It involves creating a basic version of software with all the required features. Further improvements are made as decided during the meetups or calls. The increments to the software are made to the modules, along with the addition of user-friendly features. 

Milestone Checks 

It is aimed at client and team improvement and development. Here, the teams analyze the previous developments after reaching a specific and significant part of the project. 

Popular Tools in Agile Software Development

The tool eases the planning of software projects such as Agile and sprint planning. It also contributes to responsive and transparent collaboration. Project managers and developers generally use Jira for task distribution, story tracking, and development tasks. Additionally, Jira also provides real-time updates on release details and improves the team performance. 

The docker platform is widely used to set up and manage the containers required to meet the need for flexibility and application deployment on a certain host. The platform delivers the containers through virtualization at the Operating System. The containers comprise different components such as configuration files, software, and libraries, thus meeting the needs. Docker also helps to communicate between containers. Moreover, it holds more benefits than traditional virtual machines. 

The tool is used to effortlessly solve the problem of handling multiple containers. It is an open-source platform that supports scaling and automated application deployment. It also manages container applications, containerized workloads, and automation of container deployments, and it supports declarative configuration. Kubernetes is used for its ability to automate the deployment and scaling processes of complex containerized applications. 

It is another open-source automation that is free to use for Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) tasks. The software development teams use it to build, test, deployment of CI/CD tasks. It offers effective integration options and automates the CI/CD environment. 

Slack is a popular tool in Agile software development , most commonly used in business communications, and it is effective for collaboration. It is considered better than emails for team members as it provides an opportunity for natural collaboration. Here, two types of communication are possible: direct messaging and conventional IRC or Internet Relay Chat. The IRC includes functionalities such as private groups and topic-specific chat rooms or channels. Moreover, the conversations are also divided into public and private channels along with direct messages. It eliminates the one-to-one or group chats and introduces thread-based chats, which are easier to follow. 

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Advantages of Agile Software Development

The incorporation of Agile development in software engineering has the following advantages: 

• People and interactions are preferred over tools and processes in the usage of Agile software development methodology.
• It leads to a regular focus on improved design and technical excellence.
• The Agile development process assists in improvement by allowing immediate feedback.
• Fastens the software development process, thus increasing customer trust.
• Allows quick adaptability to meet the change in requirements.
• Incorporates flexibility and adaptability.
• Enhances quality and reliability through a focus on quality assurance and continuous improvement.
• Increase team confidence and allow the set up of a collaborative, positive, and supportive workplace culture.

Disadvantages of Agile Software Development Life Cycle

The disadvantages of the Agile software development process are listed as follows: 

• Agile development is linked with lesser documentation and a higher focus on codes. 
• Agile software development depends on continuous iteration and feedback from customers, leading to difficult estimation of timelines, outcomes, and budgets of projects.
• Understanding the quantity and intensity of effort required for project completion is challenging at an early stage of the Agile software development lifecycle. 
• Dependency on the customer leads to wrong progress in the project if the team encounters ambiguity. 
• It is difficult for new programmers to adapt to the workplace environment as the senior programmers make most decisions. 
• Higher flexibility and adaptability can also lead to scope creep and lack of control over project scope. 
• The swiftness of Agile development with high intensity, more number of sprints, and close deadlines lead to mental exhaustion and increased pressure on team members, further leading to burnout. 
• Agile development lacks the structure compared to other methodologies, which results in oversight and poor governance.

Roles and Responsibilities in Agile Development

In the Agile software development life cycle, each team member plays a significant role in the development. Let us explore each member's role and responsibilities from the following:

Product Owner:

• They work as a facilitator in review sessions and sprint planning.
• Product owners assume the role of a liaison between investors and the team members.
• They help to determine the sprint goals and lead the development of user stories and tasks.
• They check if the tasks are complete and accurate to meet the client’s expectations.
• Product owners give feedback and suggestions to enhance the quality of the processes.

Scrum Master or Team Lead: 

• They eliminate obstacles to ensure team progress.
• They understand the foundations of Scrum and Agile.
• They assist in the development of tasks and user stories.
• Scrum masters monitor tasks and sprints.
• They focus on productivity and high-quality deliverables.

Development Team Members: 

• They must have a strong understanding of the scrum framework.
• They are responsible for product implementation.
• They collaborate with other team members to ensure effective and efficient product development.
• They ensure that products or processes meet client’s or customer’s expectations.
• They work on prioritized work by the product owner in the sprint.

Stakeholders: 

• They take the lead in sprint planning.
• They provide feedback and suggestions to stakeholders and team members.
• Stakeholders guide product owners to ensure user stories and productivity to meet expectations.
• They provide training to team members in Scrum and Agile processes
• Stakeholders aid in determining sprint goals and objectives

How to Implement Agile Software Development?

To implement the Agile methodology successfully for software development, you need to review the following points:

Step 1: Define and Plan the Project Scope and Vision

Communicate with the team and use the Elevator Pitch method. Find the target customer, statement of need, specific product name and category, its benefits, primary competitive alternative, and final statement of primary differentiation. 

Step 2: Develop the Path to Reaching the Product 

The product owner must use the strategy to develop the path to the product or software. It will include goals and how to achieve them. Every goal will have features, metrics, and other key information. 

Step 3: Schedule Deadlines

It includes prioritizing the software features to be launched first, followed by subsequent losses. It will include 3 to 5 sprints. 

Step 4: Plan the Sprint 

The steps shift from macro-level workings to micro-level working, which involves focusing on specific tasks. Now, the sprints must also be planned to take place with the project managers, product owners, and scrum masters. The sprint will involve creating a list of backlog items, such as undeveloped features or other components of software, to be completed in the timeframe. 

Step 5: Conduct Daily Meetings

It is essential to get daily updates through a small meeting to be concluded in 10 to 15 minutes. Team members here will inform us of their previous day's accomplishments, present-day works, and challenges being faced, if any. 

Step 6: Sprint Reviews 

Accomplishment of milestones, such as delivery of specific software updates, bug removal or introduction of new software functionality, must be linked with the analysis of previous tasks. It includes checking the alignment of plans with deliveries. Here, product owners also reflect on inaccuracies and inefficiencies by finding the associated reasons. 

Step 7: Sprint Retrospective

It includes learning from the previous processes and finding the shortcomings. Here, all the involved members must identify the learnings and scope of improvement by avoiding negative actions in their next task.

Are you a professional who is aspiring to be a Agile Scrum Master? Then check out the ASM certification course now.

Think you need more skilling up to do? You can check out Simplilearn’s Agile Scrum Master Certification Training Course . We cover how Agile can be implemented in the course, different Agile methodologies, scrum concepts, and much more in detail. The course will also enhance your ability to develop and deliver quality products to customers. 

1. What differentiates Agile from traditional software development models? How does Agile ensure product quality? 

Traditional software development models follow a fixed plan, while Agile software development models allow flexibility and adaptability to changing environments. Additionally, the Agile method is iterative. The Agile method is associated with daily scrum meetings, noting milestones, and prefers customers’ needs along with other prioritizations to deliver quality products. 

2. Can Agile be applied to large, complex projects? 

Agile methodologies are suitable for small and cross-functional teams. The effectiveness decreases on application to large and complex projects requiring handling large numbers of teams and stakeholders. 

3. How does Agile handle changes in customer requirements? 

Agile handles the change in customer requirements by reviewing and prioritizing the changes, making adjustments, discussing between sprints, developing plans, and communicating with Agile software developers to incorporate the changed plans. 

4. What are some common misconceptions about Agile?

A few common misconceptions associated with Agile are that it lacks planning, fast speed, roles or responsibilities, process control, deadlines, documentation, and change management. 

About the Author

Simplilearn is one of the world’s leading providers of online training for Digital Marketing, Cloud Computing, Project Management, Data Science, IT, Software Development, and many other emerging technologies.

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