I was asked by a corporate Programme Management Office (PMO) to provide a glossary definition for “Agile”. This is the definition I gave them.

The Agile Manifesto introduced the term “Agile” in 2001 to embrace various development methods in use from the early 1990s. Agile is most commonly used in software development, particularly product development, but has been used in other domains (e.g. research, process improvement). Agile is based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Of the various agile methods the most common in use at <the corporation> are Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP) and Kanban. Scrum and XP brought together key elements of existing rapid development techniques whereas Kanban applies practices from lean manufacturing to software development. Most software organisations are now using some agile practices. For example the technical practices from XP are now in common use across the software industry. Agile can sit alongside or within other project and development approaches.