Agile

Agile usually refers to an entity that possesses agility.

Agile may also refer to:

Science

Businesses

Military

Other uses

Project management

Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria. A project is a temporary endeavor designed to produce a unique product, service or result with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables) undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with business as usual (or operations), which are repetitive, permanent, or semi-permanent functional activities to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and constraints. This information is usually described in a user or project manual, which is created at the beginning of the development. The primary constraints of many things. The secondary — and more ambitious — challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and integrate them to meet pre-defined objectives.

Agile management

Agile management, or agile process management, or simply agile refer to an iterative, incremental method of managing the design and build activities for engineering, information technology, and other business areas that aims to provide new product or service development in a highly flexible and interactive manner; an example is its application in Scrum, an original form of agile software development. It requires capable individuals from the relevant business, openness to consistent customer input, and management openness to non-hierarchical forms of leadership. Agile can in fact be viewed as a broadening and generalization of the principles of the earlier successful array of Scrum concepts and techniques to more diverse business activities. Agile also traces its evolution to a "consensus event", the publication of the "Agile manifesto", and it has conceptual links to lean techniques, kanban (かんばん(看板)), and the Six Sigma area of business ideas.<sup class="reference plainlinks nourlexpansion" id="ref_Interest in the Scrum agile process framework is exploding as companies discover that Scrum enables them to manage software projects with greater reliability and improve responsiveness to customers." (at the cPrime online studying network)">

Agile software development

Agile software development is a set of software development methods in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing,cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, also known as the Agile Manifesto, was first proclaimed in 2001, six years after "agile methodology" was originally introduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The manifesto came out of the DSDM Consortium in 1994, although its roots go back to the mid 1980s at DuPont and texts by James Martin and James Kerr et al.

History

Incremental software development methods trace back to 1957. In 1974, E. A. Edmonds wrote a paper that introduced an adaptive software development process. Concurrently and independently, the same methods were developed and deployed by the New York Telephone Company's Systems Development Center under the direction of Dan Gielan. In the early 1970s, Tom Gilb started publishing the concepts of evolutionary project management (EVO), which has evolved into competitive engineering. During the mid- to late 1970s, Gielan lectured extensively throughout the U.S. on this methodology, its practices, and its benefits.

Software development

Software development is the process of computer programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications and frameworks involved in a software release life cycle and resulting in a software product. The term refers to a process of writing and maintaining the source code, but in a broader sense of the term it includes all that is involved between the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software, ideally in a planned and structured process. Therefore, software development may include research, new development, prototyping, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products.

Software can be developed for a variety of purposes, the three most common being to meet specific needs of a specific client/business (the case with custom software), to meet a perceived need of some set of potential users (the case with commercial and open source software), or for personal use (e.g. a scientist may write software to automate a mundane task). Embedded software development, that is, the development of embedded software such as used for controlling consumer products, requires the development process to be integrated with the development of the controlled physical product. System software underlies applications and the programming process itself, and is often developed separately.