Agile Is as Agile Does

Starting in the mid 1990s, a group of process mavens began advocating a new model for software development. As opposed to the heavyweight plan-driven models mentioned above and espoused by groups like the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon,⁸ this new process model was lightweight. It required less documentation and fewer process controls. It was targeted at small to medium-sized software projects and smaller teams of developers. It was intended to allow these teams of developers to quickly adjust to changing requirements and customer demands, and it proposed to release completed software much more quickly than the plan-driven models. It was, in a word, agile.⁹

Agile development works from the proposition that the goal of any software development project is working code. And because the focus is on working software, then the development team should spend most of their time writing code, not writing documents. This gives these processes the name lightweight.