Agile Software Development is a set of software development methods in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.
It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change.
Agile software development is an umbrella term for approaches to developing software that reflect the values and principles agreed upon by The Agile Alliance, a group of 17 software practitioners in 2001. As documented in their Manifesto for Agile Software Development the practitioners 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 practitioners cite inspiration from new practices at the time including extreme programming, scrum, dynamic systems development method, adaptive software development and being sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes.
Many software development practices emerged from the agile mindset. These agile-based practices, sometimes called Agile (with a capital A) include requirements, discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/end user(s).
While there is much anecdotal evidence that the agile mindset and agile-based practices improve the software development process, the empirical evidence is limited and less than conclusive.