Agility beyond software development

Abstract

Agile software development grew out of a variety of alternative software development methods that shared a common set of values and principles. After two decades, agile software development remains loosely defined, but has been widely accepted. This acceptance has gained the attention of other fields with discussions of applying agile to their work, for example agile systems engineering and agile program management. However, agile was defined in terms of software development, both in practice and in principle. Therefore, translation into other fields has been challenging. This paper derives a set of agile characteristics and discusses two benefits of accepting such a set of characteristics for (a) application of agile to other fields beyond software development and (b) for measurement of agility.