What is agile?

What is agile in simple terms?

Agile is a flexible, iterative approach to project management and product development that helps teams adapt quickly to change, improve collaboration, and deliver value early and often. Agile is also a human-centered approach to work, empowering individuals with the autonomy to pursue creative solutions to their goals.

Based on the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, today you can find agile practices being leveraged across a variety of roles, levels, functions, and industries. Scrum Alliance continues to advance its position of Agile for Anyone™ by equipping people everywhere with essential agile skills.

Whether you're a product developer building a new mobile app or a mountaineer training to climb Mount Rainier, your ability to remain flexible but focused will help you reach your goals. With agility over rigidity, you can pivot when new features are requested midway through development, or adjust your plan when unexpected weather rolls in on your summit day.

Agile's core values

The broad term "agile" refers to a collection of skills and practices that originate from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, whose creators—while uncovering better ways of developing software—discovered the significance of valuing the items on the left of this list over those on the right:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Like many of us today, the 17 people who gathered to create this manifesto in 2001 were searching for a lighter, less rigid approach to delivering value to their customers; a way of doing things that would free them from the documentation-heavy software development of the day. 

The beauty of these core beliefs is their versatility and the fact that they've transcended the decades. Today's most successful businesses and organizations across industries tend to have agile practices built into their operations. 

In your career, you may see agile values at work in these ways:

• Customer collaboration: By involving customers throughout the development process, you can ensure the product meets their needs. Compare this to the delayed feedback you may receive if you wait to deliver anything of value to your customer until the very end of your project. Their needs may have changed during that time, putting you back at square one.
• Iterative development: With agile practices, you can deliver work or value in small, manageable increments, which means you'll receive regular feedback throughout development and be able to make adjustments as needed.
• Embracing change: An agile mindset welcomes changing requirements, even late in development, to improve the product.

Agile case studies

From software development to healthcare to education, agile practices are helping people across the globe deliver more value in their careers while adapting to all of the emerging technologies, economic complexities, and unprecedented innovation that is commonplace today.

To understand how people are utilizing agility, check out Agile in Action, our collection of case studies from companies like Best Buy and Texas Mutual.

Agile for Anyone: Who benefits from agile skills?

While software development is the original agile realm, today agile is a versatile skill set applicable to a wide range of functions.

Software engineers do indeed continue to benefit from these foundational skills, as do teams in departments and industries including:

• Human Resources
• Marketing
• Sales
• Manufacturing
• Education
• Healthcare
• Fashion
• Construction

Agile provides practical value in virtually every corner of an organization. It has the potential to help anyone improve their ability to stay flexible yet focused amid change and uncertainty.

Agile training

There are several ways to get started if you're interested in learning more about agile. First, there's a wide variety of books you can read to learn about the basics. We recommend starting with a review of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, to see where it all started.

Training is a good way to build the agile skills that employers are looking for, and there are many types of training to choose from. Scrum Alliance offers many courses for complete beginners, seasoned practitioners, and everyone in between:

Beginner courses

• Agile Essentials
• Scrum Essentials
• Certified ScrumMaster®
• Certified Scrum Product Owner®
• Certified Scrum Developer®
• Certified Agile Facilitator™
• Certified Agile Scaling Practitioner™
• Introduction to Agile Coaching

Courses for experienced agilists

• Advanced Certified ScrumMaster
• Certified Scrum Professional®–ScrumMaster
• Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner
• Certified Scrum Professional–Product Owner
• Certified Agile Leader®

Agile frameworks and thinking outside of methodology

Why agile isn't really a methodology

Many organizations are attracted to agile as a way of remaining flexible as they're buffeted by change. Some of them refer to their approach as an "agile methodology"; however, calling the approach "agile practices" is a more accurate way to wrap daily operations around an agile mindset. Here's why "practices" is a more accurate description than "methodology", according to Certified Scrum Trainer® and agile leadership coach Bernie Maloney:

"Methodologies are based on planning and predictions. Methodologies take a set of known inputs, put them through a sequence of steps, and produce a pretty repeatable outcome.

While agile can do that, it handles less predictable situations much more effectively. 

Frameworks are sets of enabling constraints, like alphabets and musical scales. They enable creativity and solutions within those constraints to meet emerging needs."

Frameworks that support agility

One way to put agile into action is with a framework, the most common of which include:

• Scrum: Scrum is a lightweight framework for managing complex projects that emphasizes iterative progress, cross-functional team collaboration, and continuous feedback through timeboxed events like sprints, daily scrums, and sprint reviews.
• Kanban: Kanban is a workflow management method that supports adaptability by visualizing tasks, limiting work in progress, and enabling continuous, incremental improvements, making it ideal for teams that need to respond quickly to change without fixed-length iterations.
• Extreme Programming (XP): Extreme Programming is an agile development framework, originally created for software, that emphasizes technical excellence through practices like paired and test-driven development, while promoting frequent releases in short development cycles to improve responsiveness to changing requirements.
• Lean software development: Lean software development is focused on optimizing efficiency and minimizing waste by applying lean principles to streamline processes, deliver faster, and maximize customer value throughout the development lifecycle.
• Hybrid and custom approaches: Scrumban is one example of a hybrid framework utilizing aspects of scrum and kanban. Teams may choose such a mixed or custom approach, and experiment with aspects of different frameworks, as they pursue what works best for their context.

While these frameworks offer structured ways to practice agile, the true spirit of agility lies not in rigid adherence to any one method, but in embracing the core values of adaptability, collaboration, and continuous improvement—values that can be embodied in countless ways beyond any specific framework.

Agile isn't possible without a collaborative, communicative team. A team works together to develop solutions to complex problems and to carry projects and products over the finish line.

Agile teams are often cross-functional, meaning they bring together people with different skills—like design, development, testing, and product knowledge—into one team. This helps teams deliver complete, valuable solutions early and often, without being delayed by handing work off to other departments for completion.

Agile teams are trusted to manage their own work. In a self-organizing team, there's no manager assigning tasks, telling individuals what they must do. Instead, the agile team members decide together how to achieve their goals. This fosters ownership, creativity, and a sense of shared responsibility.

Agile team practices and tools

While agile teams often adopt tools to support their agility, they place collaboration and mindset over any specific tool. Tools are there to support, but not to determine, how the team works together.

Some of the most common practices and tools include:

• User stories. Instead of long, detailed requirements, agile teams may utilize user stories, which are short, simple descriptions of a feature from the user's (or customer's) point of view. For example: "As a shopper, I want to filter products by size so I can find what fits me." 

User stories can be used by any type of team. Consider, for example, an HR team's user story: "As a new hire, I want access to a clear onboarding checklist, so I can get up to speed quickly and feel confident on my first day."

User stories help teams connect with the problem to solve, without dictating the solution to build.

• Daily scrums. A timeboxed daily meeting supports the team's ability to self-organize. In this gathering, they synchronize on the work they're doing to reach their next goal and identify impediments in their way that need to be resolved.

• Work boards. Agile teams often use a workboard to visualize their efforts and their progress toward their goals. They may use a work board to visualize their product and sprint backlogs, and their work in progress.

• Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). On agile software teams, code changes are integrated and deployed often. CI means regularly merging code changes into a shared repository to catch issues early. CD automates the release process, so working code can be pushed live quickly and reliably.

• Test-driven development (TDD). Another practice relevant to software teams, TDD is a practice where developers write automated tests before they write the code. This helps ensure the code works as expected and reduces the risk of bugs.

You can use CI/CD and TDD even if you're not working on software: For example, A course instructor can apply continuous integration and continuous development principles by collaborating with peers to co-develop and refine course materials, much like pairing in software development. 

Through regular review and feedback—akin to test-driven development—they ensure learning objectives are met and session timing is realistic. When issues are discovered in shared templates or tools, they are promptly corrected and made available for immediate use in the next workshop. 

New improvements, like better ways to present content, are tested, refined, and integrated into future sessions, keeping the course continuously evolving while maintaining its core learning goals.

Adaptability

In the right context, agility helps you respond quickly to change. The change in question may be customer feedback, a usability test, a disruption in the market, or an unforeseen opportunity. The idea is that your creativity and flexibility help you adapt to any change. As a team, you will be able to create and adjust just-in-time plans, instead of starting over from the beginning.

Better products (or services, or whatever value it is that you deliver)

By building and testing in small chunks, you'll catch issues early and continuously refine the product. This leads to better results and fewer surprises at launch.

Happier customers

Frequent feedback loops mean customers are involved throughout the process. The result? A product that truly meets their needs.

Accelerated time-to-market

Your iterative approach means you can deliver usable versions or usable slices of a product early, often in weeks rather than months.

Engaged employees

Agile environments encourage collaboration, autonomy, and creativity—all characteristics of work environments that people actually want to work in. Agile teams have a lot of ownership over their work and often feel passionate about what they are delivering to their customers and stakeholders, leading to workplaces that are more human-centered than others.

Scrum Alliance features expert-led courses in a variety of topics to help you build your agile toolkit. You'll earn a credential to showcase your knowledge to employers while standing out in your profession as someone who knows how to adapt and ultimately thrive.

We provide full-length certification courses led by experienced agile trainers, as well as shorter, more narrowly focused microcredentials that come in on-demand and trainer-led options.