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I'm involved in an Agile adoption effort that has done of lot of communication as of late. And one of the things we always cover in any intro training is the question What is Agile Software Development?" Our standard answer and presentation materials usually involves citing the text of the Agile Manifestoand either this definition by Scott Ambler and/or this comment by James Highsmith that "Ultimately, Agility is about embracing change rather than attempting to resist it, [and a] focus on talent and skills of individuals and teams." I've noticed our responses attempt to describe what Agile Development is by describing what it looks like (Ambler's definition), or the Agile values (from the manifesto), or the emphasis on change and collaboration (Highsmith). What they don't do is describe what Agility is! The Highsmith comment comes closest, but none of them really describe what it means for something to have the ability called agility. I think it is key to understand what Agility is, and why/how it works, in order to understand Agile software development. I think without that understanding, it can be much harder to understand and apply the principles of lean/agile development, and to "inspect and adapt" to improve the right things in the right direction. Toward that end, I did a bit of research on a lot of different definitions of agility (beyond some of my previous blog entries like Nutshell definitions of Agile development, Agile development distilled, and Business Agility defined) and of various attributes of agility. And I plan to share them in some blog-entries for each of the following:
So "stay tuned" to this blog over the next several days because I intend to post on this more than weekly.  Posted: 2009-04-03 12:52:00
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