What's Agility Anyway?

Adriana Beal has spent the last 15 years helping Fortune 100 companies, innovation companies and startups build better software that solves the right problem and aligns with business strategy. Her current focus of work is customer development and product strategy for tech startups.

  Agile   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

Agile practices are not intrinsically “value-adding” — they must be aligned to business needs and goals in order to provide true value. By measuring their agility based on compliance with a particular method, organizations may prevent their teams from adapting practices to suit projects with different characteristics and needs.

In the last 10 years or so, we have seen the emergence of a number of software development methods collectively labeled as Agile. Methods or frameworks that are designated “agile” include Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Crystal, Feature Driven Development (FDD) and Kanban, among others.What does it mean, though, to say that a company is “adopting agile” or “embracing agility”? With so many disparate agile methods, variants and derivatives, is it even possible to find a cohesive meaning for agile software development?

In the paper Agility from First Principles: Reconstructing the Concept of Agility in Information Systems Development(Information Systems Research Vol. 20, No. 3., September 2009, p. 332), Kieran Conboy describes how, as a result of the dominating role the industry played in the early years of the agile movement, the majority of discussions about agility became centered around industry-driven methods. This industry-centered perspective helped establish agile as a highly multifaceted concept, used by …

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