How good are agile methods?

The software industry seems to be embracing yet another change to the way it does business. Because of their emphasis on agility and time-to-market, many programming shops are moving to agile methods. Unlike more traditional approaches, these methods focus on generating early releases of working products using mostly collaborative techniques such as pair programming, refactoring, and having customers work on site as team members. Programmers use these releases-which are working products, not prototypes-to demonstrate features and functions to stakeholders involved in their use, marketing, and support. This article surveys the experience software engineers in a wide, range of industries have had in deploying agile methods.