Agile is an incremental delivery approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster. Agile replaces the high-risk “big bang” release concept with agile teams who deliver work in small, but consumable, increments. This empirical process encourages continuous inspection and adaptation, creating a mechanism for responding to change quickly.

With the introduction and explosion of open-source technology in the 1980’s, and the flurry of new and ever-changing languages and tools to support it, Harvard professors Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka wrote an article in 1986 titled, “The New New Product Development Game.” They emphasized a holistic approach, focusing on speed and flexibility, and a rejection of silos and sequential handoffs. In that article was the first reference and connection to rugby, which inspired the term scrum.

Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber created scrum, which grew quickly in acceptance and adoption when the Scrum Alliance was formed to offer scrum classes. In 2001, the Agile Manifesto was created, which further solidified its popularity and use. In 2011, Scaled Agile Framework came up with a framework for agile to scale for larger products and solutions.