The best description I have found for agility in business comes from Goldman (1995):

“Agility is dynamic, context-specific, aggressively change-embracing, and growth-oriented. It is not about improving efficiency, cutting costs, or battening down the business hatches to ride out fearsome competitive ‘storms.’ It is about succeeding and about winning: about succeeding in emerging competitive arenas, and about winning profits, market share, and customers in the very center of the competitive storms many companies now fear.”

The Agile Software Development Series

Among the people concerned with agility in software development over the last decade, Jim Highsmith and I found so much in common that we joined efforts to bring to press an Agile Software Development Series based around relatively light, effective, human-powered software-development techniques.

We base the series on these two core ideas:

· Different projects need different processes or methodologies.

· Focusing on skills, communication, and community allows the project to be more effective and more agile than focusing on processes.

The series has three main tracks, showing

· Techniques to improve the effectiveness of a person who is doing a particular sort of job. This might be a person who is designing a user interface, gathering requirements, planning a project, designing, or testing. Whoever is performing such a job will want to know how the best people in the world do their jobs. Writing Effective Use Cases (Cockburn WEUC) and GUIs with Glue (Hohmann 2002) are two individual technique books.

· Techniques to improve the effectiveness of a group of people. These might include techniques for team building, project retrospectives, decision making, and the like. Improving Software Organizations (Mathiassen 2001) and Surviving Object-Oriented Projects (Cockburn SOOP) are two group technique books.