Agile

Agile is an iterative, adaptive approach to delivering work in small increments with continuous feedback — valuing working outcomes, collaboration and responding to change over rigid up-front plans.

Agile is a family of values, principles and practices for delivering work incrementally and iteratively. Rather than planning everything up front and delivering once at the end, Agile teams work in short cycles, produce a usable increment each cycle, gather feedback, and adapt. It is defined by the 2001 Agile Manifesto, which prizes individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and responding to change — without discarding process, documentation, contracts or planning, but valuing the former more. Scrum, Kanban and XP are specific frameworks within the Agile family.

Why it matters

Agile exists because up-front plans fail when requirements are uncertain or change fast — which is most knowledge work. By delivering small increments and inspecting them frequently, teams reduce the risk of building the wrong thing, get value into users’ hands sooner, and can change direction cheaply. It also raises engagement: short feedback loops and self-organising teams tend to be more motivating than long, plan-driven marches.

When to use it

Agile fits work with high uncertainty, evolving requirements and a customer available for feedback — software, product development, design. It fits less well where scope is genuinely fixed and predictable, where a single big delivery is mandated, or in heavily regulated environments (though hybrids adapt it). The honest test is whether frequent feedback would actually change what you build.

How to use it

1. Maintain a prioritised backlog of work expressed as value to users.
2. Work in short iterations (or continuous flow), delivering a usable increment each cycle.
3. Hold regular feedback and planning conversations with the customer or product owner.
4. Inspect and adapt: review the increment and the way of working after each cycle.
5. Keep teams small, cross-functional and self-organising, with the authority to decide how to do the work.

Example

Instead of spending six months building a full expense app and launching once, an Agile team ships a basic "submit and approve" flow in three weeks, learns that users most want receipt scanning, and reprioritises to build that next — delivering the highest-value feature months earlier than a plan-driven approach would have.

Template

Agile artefacts include a product backlog, sprint backlog, definition of done, and a board (Scrum or Kanban) — start from those templates.

Browse templates →

Tools

Related topics

FAQs

Alternatives

• Waterfall — plan-driven, sequential delivery
• Hybrid — mixes predictive and Agile
• Lean — flow and waste-elimination focus, complementary to Agile