Software Development for the 21st Century
Agile is a way of developing software for the 21st Century. Computers are cheap and ubiquitous - including mobile phones, tablets, wearable devices and more. Users and the user experience are at the centre of the process.
Agile started from a realisation that previous software development models were no longer appropriate. They were developed for the time when computers were expensive and rare. It was much easier (and cheaper) to design for the machine and make users adjust to the machine than it was to design for users. Times have changed.
Agile is a way of thinking, not a methodology.
Many individual developers moved away from traditional waterfall models to a more flexible approach that recognised the changes in technology and social structure. This change was formalised at a conference in 2001 (at Snowbird, Utah) which created the Agile Manifesto. It was a disparate group of people, but they all agreed that a change from the old approaches was needed - and found a suprising amount of commonality in their ways of dealing with it. It was a useful and important event.
That was quite a long time ago. Some parts of the manifesto are still true, but some have changed. There are now many ways of 'being Agile' but all of them come back to the ideas expressed in the manifesto - Scrum, Lean, Extreme Programming and other methods are all different ways to achieve Agileness.
This site explains the ideas in the manifesto, removes some misconceptions and helps you understand what Agile is really about. It does not advocate or explain any specific methodology. Everything we present here is applicable to all Agile projects and people.