In software development, agile practices (sometimes written "Agile") include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/end user(s), Popularized in the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development, these values and principles 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 effectiveness of software professionals, teams and organizations, the empirical evidence is mixed and hard to find.
Iterative and incremental software development methods can be traced back as early as 1957, with evolutionary project management and adaptive software development emerging in the early 1970s.
During the 1990s, a number of lightweight software development methods evolved in reaction to the prevailing heavyweight methods (often referred to collectively as waterfall) that critics described as overly regulated, planned, and micromanaged. These lightweight methods included: rapid application development (RAD), from 1991; the unified process (UP) and dynamic systems development method (DSDM), both from 1994; Scrum, from 1995; Crystal Clear and extreme programming (XP), both from 1996; and feature-driven development (FDD), from 1997. Although these all originated before the publication of the Agile Manifesto, they are now collectively referred to as agile software development methods.
Already since 1991 similar changes had been underway in manufacturing and management thinking derived from Lean management.
In 2001, seventeen software developers met at a resort in Snowbird, Utah to discuss lightweight development methods. They were: Kent Beck (Extreme Programming), Ward Cunningham (Extreme Programming), Dave Thomas (PragProg, Ruby), Jeff Sutherland (Scrum), Ken Schwaber (Scrum), Jim Highsmith (Adaptive Software Development), Alistair Cockburn (Crystal), Robert C.