Learn what agile means when it comes to coding, culture, and making your job in software development awesome. DevOps is agile applied beyond the software team. Read our guide on how agile, DevOps and continuous delivery all work together or not. More than fifteen years after its founding, agile practices remain as relevant as ever and the businesses that embrace agile continue to lead the pack. Whereas the traditional "waterfall" approach has one discipline contribute to the project, then "throw it over the wall" to the next contributor, agile calls for collaborative cross-functional teams.
Open communication, collaboration, adaptation, and trust amongst team members are at the heart of agile. Although the project lead or product owner typically prioritizes the work to be delivered, the team takes the lead on deciding how the work will get done, self-organizing around granular tasks and assignments.
Agile isn't defined by a set of ceremonies or specific development techniques. Rather, agile is a group of methodologies that demonstrate a commitment to tight feedback cycles and continuous improvement.
The original Agile Manifesto didn't prescribe two-week iterations or an ideal team size. It simply laid out a set of core values that put people first. The way you and your team live those values today — whether you do scrum by the book, or blend elements of kanban and XP — is entirely up to you. Teams choose agile so they can respond to changes in the marketplace or feedback from customers quickly without derailing a year's worth of plans.
But it's not just a numbers game—first and foremost, it's about people. As described by the Agile Manifesto, authentic human interactions are more important than rigid processes. Collaborating with customers and teammates is more important than predefined arrangements. And delivering a working solution to the customer's problem is more important than hyper-detailed documentation.
An agile team unites under a shared vision, then brings it to life the way they know is best. Each team sets their own standards for quality, usability, and completeness. Their "definition of done" then informs how fast they'll churn the work out. Although it can be scary at first, company leaders find that when they put their trust in an agile team, that team feels a greater sense of ownership and rises to meet or exceed management's expectations.
The publication of the Agile Manifesto in marks the birth of agile as a methodology. Since then, many agile frameworks have emerged such as scrum, kanban , lean , and Extreme Programming XP. Each embodies the core principles of frequent iteration, continuous learning, and high quality in its own way.
Scrum and XP are favored by software development teams, while kanban is a darling among service-oriented teams like IT or human resources. Today, many agile teams combine practices from a few different frameworks, spiced up with practices unique to the team. Some teams adopt some agile rituals like regular stand-ups, retros, backlogs, etc. The agile teams of tomorrow will value their own effectiveness over adherence to doctrine.
Openness, trust, and autonomy are emerging as the cultural currency for companies who want to attract the best people and get the most out of them. Such companies are already proving that practices can vary across teams, as long as they're guided by the right principles.
The way each team practices agile should be unique to their needs and culture. Indeed, no two teams inside Atlassian have identical agile practices.
Although many of our teams organize their work in sprints, estimate in story points, and prioritize their backlogs, we're not die-hard practitioners of scrum. Or kanban. Or any other trademarked methodology. Instead, we give each team the autonomy to cherry-pick the practices that will make them most effective. And we encourage you to take a similar approach.
For example, if you're on a queue-oriented team like IT, kanban provides a solid foundation for your agile practice. But nothing should stop you from sprinkling in a few scrum practices like demo sessions with stakeholders or regular retrospectives.
The key to doing agile right is embracing a mindset of continuous improvement. Experiment with different practices and have open, honest discussions about them with your team. Keep the ones that work, and throw out the ones that don't.
Because we believe each team must forge their own path to agility, you won't find highly prescriptive information on this site. Above all other points, the ability for agile development requirements to emerge and evolve , and the ability to embrace change with the appropriate trade-offs , the team build the right product.
In agile development, the emphasis is absolutely on building the right product. The active involvement, cooperation and collaboration make agile development teams a much more enjoyable place for most people. Instead of big specs, we discuss requirements in workshops. Instead of lengthy status reports, we collaborate around a task-board discussing progress.
In my experience this makes it a much more rewarding approach for everyone. In turn this helps to create highly motivated, high performance teams that are highly cooperative.
But there are implications. Become a Data-Driven Organisation. All About Agile, by Kelly Waters. Written by Kelly Waters. This also provides the opportunity to beta test software after each Sprint, gaining valuable feedback early in the project and providing the ability to make changes as needed.
By breaking down the project into manageable units, the project team can focus on high-quality development, testing, and collaboration. Also, by producing frequent builds and conducting testing and reviews during each iteration, quality is improved by finding and fixing defects quickly and identifying expectation mismatches early. By incorporating the ability to change, we have been able to better incorporate feedback from demos, usability testing, and client and customer feedback.
Agile is a powerful tool for software development, not only providing benefits to the development team, but also providing a number of important business benefits to the client. Agile software development values working software over in-depth documentation, and stakeholder engagement, customer collaboration, and transparency over process.
The Agile software development methodology centers around time-boxed project cycles known as sprints. As such, the sprint consists of a significantly smaller number of features than a waterfall project. Limiting the features in this manner makes for a more manageable product development and release cycle.
An Agile team is much smaller than a traditional project team — ideally no more than 12 individuals. The team consists of developers, analysts, QA testers, the product owner, and the project manager, also known as the Scrum master. The product owner represents the interests of the stakeholders on the project and is available to the team throughout each sprint to answer questions and provide feedback. During a sprint, the team participates in daily stand up meetings where they discuss progress.
At the end of the sprint, the team does a formal release and then begins a planning session for the next sprint. Before Agile, companies followed a more structured approach to mobile application development and testing. The approach, known as waterfall, carried projects through a preset sequence of steps from inception through completion.
Each of these steps formed project phases, each of which consisted of a specific set of tasks. The waterfall approach, although effective, was process and documentation heavy. In waterfall, any requirements modifications required an analyst to update the requirements document, which then needed to be reviewed and reapproved by the stakeholders.
It was a process that caused delays and put the delivery deadline in jeopardy. Agile software development minimizes, if not eliminates, these challenges. In Agile, teams work against a set number of user stories during a time-boxed cycle. During that time, the team focuses on releasing a workable product rather than process and documentation. As such, Agile projects can release new features rapidly and more frequently than a waterfall project.
Technical debt refers to the maintenance tasks required to support the existing product. Those tasks include defect resolution, refactoring, and testing. In a traditional project methodology, this technical debt can accumulate quickly as the team focuses on new feature development to keep pace with the project timeline.
Agile software development helps keep technical debt to a minimum.
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