Agile software development is a style of software development characterized by an emphasis on people, communication, working software, and responding to change.

All Agile methodologies engage in an iterative workflow and incremental delivery of working software in short time-boxed iterations. An iteration is essentially a small release of software. Generally during each iteration many activities will occur in parallel, such as requirements, coding, and testing. Iterations are typically a fixed length (although this length varies between the methodologies) and thus are referred to as time-boxed. The time allocated to each iteration is sometimes referred to as a cycle time.