UX Glossary · A
Agile
Also: Agile methodology
Building software in short cycles that deliver working increments, rather than specifying everything up front.
Agile describes a family of approaches that build software incrementally, in short cycles, adapting as they go. It was named in 2001, when seventeen practitioners published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, which set out four value statements including “responding to change over following a plan”.
Scrum and Kanban are the two most common implementations. Scrum organises work into fixed sprints with defined roles and ceremonies; Kanban manages a continuous flow with limits on work in progress.
What it changed for design
Agile broke the assumption behind waterfall that design finishes before development starts. That is genuinely better, because it means design decisions get tested against reality early rather than being discovered as wrong at the end.
It also created a real problem, which is that research and design need to run slightly ahead of implementation to be useful. Designing inside the same sprint the work is built in produces rushed decisions. See Agile UX for how teams handle this.
In practice
The most common failure is treating Agile as a delivery speed setting rather than a feedback loop. A team that ships every two weeks but never changes direction based on what it learns has adopted the ceremonies and skipped the point.