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), adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continual improvement, and flexible responses to changes in requirements, capacity, and understanding of the problems to be solved. 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.