Agile Methods
In software engineering, agile processes accept that software is difficult to control. Software engineers focus on smaller units of work, one week or one month, and at the end of each cycle they reevaluate the project priorities.
History
Agile processes evolved in the mid 1990s as part of the reaction against high ceremony processes, like CMM and ISO-9000. These processes were seen as bureaucratic, slow, demeaning, and contradicted the ways that software engineers actually work.
Extreme Programming is considered the first established agile process after some common tactics are popular among computer programmers. Given the populality, agile process often means Extreme Programming.
The term agile process was chosen as an improvement on the term lightweight process, which had been widely used before.
See Also
Agile processes include