Agile development
Definition
Agile development is an iterative, incremental approach to building software that emphasizes collaboration, customer feedback, and the ability to respond to change over following a fixed plan.
In February 2001, seventeen software practitioners met in Snowbird, Utah and produced the Agile Manifesto — four values and twelve principles that defined a new approach to software development:
The four values:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
The values don't dismiss the right side — the manifesto says 'while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.'
Agile is not a methodology — it's a philosophy. The methodologies built on agile values include Scrum (sprints, ceremonies, defined roles), Kanban (continuous flow, WIP limits), XP (engineering practices: TDD, pair programming, continuous integration), SAFe (scaling agile across the enterprise), and LeSS (Large Scale Scrum).
In practice, most product teams call themselves 'agile' and run some version of Scrum or Kanban. The actual practice varies widely — some teams do agile well; many do 'cargo cult agile' that keeps the vocabulary without the values.
Agile teams generate a lot of whiteboard content: sprint planning boards, retrospective formats, story maps, architecture sketches, and team norms. BoardSnap is built for exactly this context — snap the board after the planning session, get a structured action plan in seconds.
Examples
- Two-week Scrum sprint: backlog refinement → sprint planning → daily standups → sprint review → retrospective → repeat
- Kanban board: To Do → In Progress → Code Review → QA → Done, with WIP limits on each column
- XP team: pair programming, test-first development, ten-minute builds, customer on-site
- SAFe program increment: eight teams plan together for five days, align on dependencies, then execute 10-week PI
Related terms
Snap a agile development. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard — including this one — into a summary and action plan.