What is Agile?

The traditional software project — sign today, receive everything 'turnkey' in a year — fails often enough that the industry invented an alternative and named it Agile. The central idea is disarmingly simple: instead of a concrete-set plan followed blindly, work is cut into stages of a week to a month; at the end of each you receive something functional to see and try, and priorities get rearranged based on what everyone just learned. For the paying client this transforms the nature of risk. You no longer wait nine months to discover the wrong thing was built; you correct course every fortnight at small cost, and the essential features enter service before the secondary ones, so the application starts earning its keep before it is 'finished'. The price of that control is involvement: Agile only works if someone on your side actually looks at each delivery and gives real feedback — an absent client turns any methodology into a lottery. Contracts survive the transition better than sceptics fear: budget, deadline and objectives still exist; what changes is that details refine along the way instead of being frozen in two hundred pages of speculation signed before anyone had learned anything.