AGILE The term ‘agile’ was created in 2001 (www.agilemanifesto.org) when a group of ‘independent thinkers around software development’ came together to talk about an alternative to the heavyweight, document-driven processes that existed at the time. Known as the ‘Waterfall method’, these old-fashioned processes comprised a sequence of technical phases that were slow and struggled to respond to changing requirements, particularly when they were mired in too much detail from the start.
The group was already working in ways that later become described as agile; an output from this meeting was the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, or the ‘Agile Manifesto’ as it is more commonly known, and its impact and success have been quite dramatic.