In the software development domain, Agile is a set of practices intended to improve the effectiveness of software development professionals, teams, and organizations. It involves discovering requirements and developing solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers - who could be end-users, or intermediate users on the way to an end-user
But Agile is more than that.
Agile is a set of principles used to improve the process of project management and software development. Agile helps teams in delivering value to customers quickly and with less effort than non-agile processes. The work produced usable increments in short periods of delivery. The requirements, plans, and results are re-evaluated consistently. The agile community wants us to believe that Agile is lightweight. But a middle linebacker for a college or professional is far from lightweight but is very agile.
Agility means being able to move quickly and easily. To think quickly and clearly. To possess ways of planning and doing work in which it is understood that making changes as they are needed is an important part of the work process.
These blog posts speak to agility in the management of projects or processes, without the required official dogma of the agilest selling us products, training, or services, while rarely if ever actually managing a development project, with a budget, delivery date, and a mandatory set of capabilities to accomplish a mission or fulfill a business strategy, in the domain of a mission-critical system:
- Agile Development Processes? Pick Your Domain First
- Seven Critical Success Factors of Project Success
- Applying Project Control Processes to Agile Development Projects
- Why Would You NEVER Apply Agile Software Development Processes?
- Any Effective Process Must ...
- Velocity in Agile
- Agile Development and Safety-Critical Software
- Agile Stories are Actually Requirements
- What's Missing from the Agile Software Development Paradigm
- Agile for Project Managers
- Agile Project Management Principles - Moving from Principles to Practices
- People Versus Process
- The CIO's Contribution to Project Failure
- Enterprise Scrum Development Process Flow
- Project Versus Product in Agile Development
- Antifragile, Macro and Micro Economics and the Misuse of Terms (Again)
- Value First, Requires Margin and Contingency
- Illogical Agile Quotes
- Process Reduces Agility? Only on De Minimis Projects
- What Software Development Models Aren't Iterative and Incremental?
- Incremental Commitment Spiral Model
- The Classic Misunderstanding between Principles, Practices, and Process
- GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide Applied to Agile
- Why Do Agilest Use Waterfall As Their Stalking Horse?
- Agile Project Management Methods
- Risk Management for Agile Software Development Projects
- Is Software Development Art or Engineering
- What Does it Mean to Focus on Value?
- Velocity versus Speed (Update)
- Deploying ERP with Agile
- 12 Principles of Agile with and without Estimates
- Definition of Done
- Software Development for the 21st Century
- The Agile Cannon
- Agile Project Management Methods for Corporate IT Projects
- The Origins of Scrum and Empirical Closed Loop Control
- Agile for Large Scale Government Programs
- The Broad Range of Domains of Agile
- What Is Management in the Context of Agile
- Deliver Fast or Deliver as Planned (Update)
- Empirical and it's Use in Agile
- Produce Shippable Software Every Sprint? Really
- Another Agile Myth
- The Dark Sides of Agile and Earned Value Management and Their Fixes
- The Notion of Value in Agile Projects
- The Story Point Problem
- Agile Terms, Let Me Count the Ways
- Agile At Scale for Software Intensive Systems
- Slicing Work Into Small Chunks Is Not Without Hazard
- The Myth of INVEST and Actual Systems
- Deadlines Always Matter
- Incremental Delivery of Features May Not Be Desirable
- Release Early and Release Often
- Fibonacci Numbers, Agile, and the Actual Mathematics
- Agile Software Development in the DOD
- Mike Cohn's Agile Quotes
- Product Development Kaizen
- Agile Program Management
- Baloney Claims: Pseudoscience and the Art of Software Methods
- Eight Principles of Agile Software Development in the US DOD
- What Do We Mean When We Say "Agile Community?"
- Can Enterprise Agile Be Bottom Up?
- The Myth of Incremental Development
- Economics of Iterative Software Development
- Agile as a Systems Engineering Paradigm
- Slicing Work Into Small Pieces
- Capabilities Based Planning in an Agile Development Paradigm
- Can Agile Be Integrated with Governance Based Development Processes?
- Ten Agile Take Aways
- Agile and the Federal Government
- The Myth and Misunderstanding of Waterfall
- Sailing and Agile
- Agile Paradigm
- Agile Means ...
- I'll Really Wish the Agile Thought Leaders Wouldn't Talk Like This
- Federal Goes Agile
- Agile Project Management
- Agile Requires Discipline, In Fact All Successful Projects Require Discipline
- Self Organizing Analogy Only Works when the Domain is Defined
- What Does It Mean To Be Agile?
- Agile in the Federal Government
- Predictive Approach As The Foil For Agile?
- Connecting the Dots in Agile
- Big Program Guidance - a Caution to Agile
- Project Governance and Agile Development
- Project Manager and Agile?
- Wanna See Agile in the Real World?
- Agile as American Football
- Is Scrum-of-Scrums Really System-of-Systems? Probably Not
- Agile and Earned Value Slide Share
- The First Agile Organization
- The Alternative to the Self Serving Agile Approach
- Another Presentation on Agile
- A Simple Fix for the Agile Manifesto
- Does Agile Need to be Named?
- Alert - The Elephant in the Agile Room
- Why Some Agilist Think One Size Fits All
- Agile Analogies
- Agile Project Management
- More Agile Claims
- When Agile Says "Value" What Do They Mean?
- Update to Agile Manifesto and Its Impact On Traditional Project Management
- Defense Industry and Scrum
- Why Is There Still Talk About Agile v. PMBOK?
- PM 2.0 ≠ Agile, But What Is PM 2.0?
- CMMI and Agile Software Development are Orthogonal
- Agile in the Product Development Context
- Agile Notions Already Are At Work
- Agile Projects and Project Management
- Another Strawman Argument for Agile Project Management
- Earned Value and Agile
- Connecting Agile Teams with the Business Strategy
- Agile Water Project
- Agile Development Versus Traditional Development
- The Recurring Agile Myth Article
- Waterfall? Not Allowed!
- Agile Status v. Deliverables Based Status
- It's not Waterfall versus Agile, It's sample time
- A Nice Overview of an Agile approach to projects
- Testing Agile Hypothesis
- Agile PM in Several Different Domains
- Large Scale Agile
- Waterfall and Agile (again)
- CMMI and Agile
- Agile Project Management - Again
- How big or small of a project is the target of APM?
- Is Agile Project Management, Project Management