Agile Manifesto
Although the site of Agile Manifesto looks very archaic, it sums up pretty much everything that has gone wrong with software development for decades. And maybe still does.
In 2001 the Agile Manifesto, signed by many supporters 1), stated that 17 seasoned software professionals had come to value:
| Individuals and interactions | over | processes and tools |
| Working software | over | comprehensive documentation |
| Customer collaboration | over | contract negotiation |
| Responding to change | over | following a plan |
Stating further
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
At the time the manifesto was published, working agile was compared to the waterfall way of working in which one phase was completed in its entirety before moving on to the next.
By the way, one of these 17 agile pioneers was Ward Cunningham2), inventor and developer of the first wiki.
The term agile (sometimes written Agile) was popularized, in this context, by the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The values and principles espoused in this manifesto were derived from and underpin a broad range of software development frameworks, including Scrum and Kanban.
While there is much anecdotal evidence that adopting agile practices and values improves the agility of software professionals, teams and organizations, some empirical studies have disputed that evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
See also Agile's 20th anniversary.