What Agile isn't : five myths you may have heard about Agile

Myth #1 It's a silver bullet. Agile won't solve all your problems. Agile is a different way of planning and delivering projects. That deals well with constant change in project goals and development environment. Studies have shown that development using Agile can drastically reduce the number of software defects and improve the ability of teams to estimate how long it will take to write new software. But there are many other problems that Agile can't solve.

Myth #2 Using Agile means that you can do what you like. Quite the opposite. Using Agile means that at any point the team is working on the thing that the client wants most, the story that was given highest priority in the last iteration.

Myth #3 Using Agile means you don't have to produce documentation. If documentation is important to the client (e.g. because her quality procedures say that she needs it), it goes on the list of stories and gets prioritized and executed just like the others. Otherwise, the focus of the project is on working code.

Myth #4 Pair programming is a luxury, and a waste of time. Never mind that there's loads of research that shows otherwise. One of the ways that Agile works is it gives you lots of opportunities to say what you mean. Programming with someone else means that you have to get straight in your head what you're going to do, straight enough that you can say it out loud and explain it to someone else before you actually do it. When you combine this with test first, each bit of functionality ends up having to be explicitly described two or three times before it actually gets implemented. This is perhaps why code that is developed using test first and pair programming tends to have so few defects.

Myth #5 Agile is just another fad The family of Agile project management methods are fundamentally different from the waterfall, Big Design Up-Front methods which have been used in the software development industry since its birth. But outside of software engineering, these kinds of methods are nothing new, in the visual arts and theatre and in other highly skilled, creative and craft-oriented industries, these methods have been around and have been used successfully for thousands years. Agile isn't a new fad, it's a very, very old one.