What Is Agile Development?

Agile development is an iterative approach to building software that emphasises short development cycles, continuous feedback, and the ability to adapt to changing requirements. Rather than planning and building everything upfront (the 'waterfall' approach), Agile breaks work into small increments, typically called sprints, each of which delivers working software.

The Agile Manifesto, written in 2001, established the core values: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. These values represented a direct reaction to the rigid, documentation-heavy processes that had come to dominate enterprise software development.

In practice, most Agile teams work in one or two week sprints. At the start of each sprint, the team selects a set of features or tasks from the product backlog. At the end of the sprint, they review what was built and plan the next sprint. This rhythm creates a regular cadence of delivery and feedback, and surfaces problems quickly rather than letting them accumulate.

For MVP builds, Agile's emphasis on working software and adaptability is well-suited to the uncertainty of early-stage product development. At Toggle, our two-week MVP build is itself a single focused sprint, scoped tightly, executed cleanly, and delivered as working software at the end.