Agile
🏠The everyday picture
A road trip with a fixed plan for every hour fails at the first traffic jam. A trip with a clear destination, short legs and a quick check at each stop arrives, even when the route changes.
📘What it really is
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Traditional waterfall projects do each phase once, in order: all requirements, then all design, then all building, then all testing. It works when requirements are fixed and well understood, but in software, needs change and surprises are common, so problems surface late and expensively.
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Agile (from the 2001 Agile Manifesto) delivers in short cycles with frequent feedback. Its values:
- individuals and interactions over processes and tools;
- working software over comprehensive documentation;
- customer collaboration over contract negotiation;
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responding to change over following a plan. (The items on the right still matter; the left matter more.)
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In practice:
- deliver small, working increments every week or two;
- show them to users and stakeholders, and adjust;
- keep quality high continuously (tests, reviews, CI/CD, Levels 4 to 6), so change stays cheap;
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the team regularly reflects and improves how it works.
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Agile isn't "no planning" or "no documentation": it's planning continuously at the right level of detail, and documenting what's useful (ADRs, runbooks, Module 91).
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Common frameworks: Scrum (Lesson 2), Kanban (Lesson 3), and combinations. Pick the lightest process that keeps the team coordinated.
🖱️Try it
Take the booking platform's MVP and plan it two ways: as a waterfall plan (phases and dates), and as an Agile plan of two-week increments, each producing something usable (for example: increment 1, tutors can publish availability; increment 2, students can book without payment; increment 3, payments; increment 4, reminders and cancellations). Write what you'd learn after each increment.
✅Quick check
Why does waterfall struggle in most software projects?
Show the answer
Requirements change and surprises are common, and problems are discovered late when they're expensive to fix.
Does Agile mean no planning or documentation?
Show the answer
No. It plans continuously at the right level and keeps useful documentation.