Agile describes approaches to software development. It focuses on team collaboration, continual planning and learning, innovation, empowerment, incremental delivery, short cycles, and delivering business value to customers with fewer headaches. The main idea is to adapt to the reality you are in today and figure out what you can do. It is important how people do their work, how they cooperate with each other, and how efficient a team’s self-organization is. It means that each team can figure out its own workflow, goals, standards for usability and quality.
Agile software development is a term that describes a set of frameworks and practices that are based on the principles of the Agile Manifesto.
It is efficient and convenient to use a particular approach to software development because it helps to decide what should be done in a particular context.
Agile is rather a set of mind than an approach as it has its own values and principles, it is a way of thinking and acting. Teams choose agile to be able to respond to the rapidly changing market, the needs of their customers and to be able to change direction when needed. In other words, they want to deliver more value to customers and reduce the risk of creating products that the market does not need. Long delivery cycles are divided into short periods – sprints. Thus delivery time shortens, and getting feedback allows teams to make corrections. Using a method like that, teams make sure that the final product meets the needs of their customers.
One of the popular Agile frameworks is Scrum – a framework that allows teams to address complex problems through adaptive solutions.
Using Agile gives a business competitive advantages and increased efficiency and helps it become a leader in its industry. Agile can be implemented not only in software development but in other spheres as well.