Agile software development

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Agile software development is an umbrella term for approaches to developing software that reflect the values and principles agreed upon by The Agile Alliance, a group of 17 software practitioners in 2001.[1] As documented in their Manifesto for Agile Software Development the practitioners value:[2]

  • 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. [3]

Many software development practices emerged from the agile mindset. These agile-based practices, sometimes called Agile (with a capital A)[4] include requirements, discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/end user(s).[5][6]

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.[7][8][9]

  1. ^ "What is Agile?". Agile Alliance. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  2. ^ Kent Beck; James Grenning; Robert C. Martin; Mike Beedle; Jim Highsmith; Steve Mellor; Arie van Bennekum; Andrew Hunt; Ken Schwaber; Alistair Cockburn; Ron Jeffries; Jeff Sutherland; Ward Cunningham; Jon Kern; Dave Thomas; Martin Fowler; Brian Marick (2001). "Manifesto for Agile Software Development". Agile Alliance. Retrieved 14 June 2010.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference LarmanGuide was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Rally (2010). "Agile With a Capital "A" Vs. agile With a Lowercase "a"". Archived from the original on 5 January 2016. Retrieved 9 September 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  5. ^ Collier 2011.
  6. ^ "What is Agile Software Development?". Agile Alliance. 8 June 2013. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  7. ^ Dybå, Tore; Dingsøyr, Torgeir (1 August 2008). "Empirical studies of agile software development: A systematic review". Information and Software Technology. 50 (9–10): 833–859. doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2008.01.006. ISSN 0950-5849. S2CID 2244031.
  8. ^ Lee, Gwanhoo; Xia, Weidong (2010). "Toward Agile: An Integrated Analysis of Quantitative and Qualitative Field Data on Software Development Agility". MIS Quarterly. 34 (1): 87–114. doi:10.2307/20721416. JSTOR 20721416. S2CID 26477249.
  9. ^ Kroll, J.; Richardson, I.; Prikladnicki, R.; Audy, J. L. (2018). "Empirical evidence in follow the Sun software development: A systematic mapping study". Information and Software Technology. 93: 30–44. doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2017.08.011. hdl:10344/6233.