What’s your agile methods “elevator speech”?

Sorry I missed a post for yesterday, but I had a bit to do to complete getting ready to leave later today for Agile 2009.

Today’s post will be short, but deliberately so as it is about asking you to submit your favorite agile “elevator speech.”

In case you haven’t heard the term before, an “elevator speech” is a brief explanation of something to get the listener interested in hearing more or reasonably informed about the subject in a short time. The “elevator” part comes from someone asking some thing like, “What if you were on an elevator with your boss and they asked you ‘I’ve been hearing a lot about . What’s it about?’ What would you say in 60 seconds, so your boss would walk away with a reasonable idea?”

So what if you were in the elevator and your boss said, “I’ve been hearing a lot about agile methods. What are they all about?” What would you say to explain agile methods in 60 seconds?

Here’s one sample (but by no means great) idea:

"Agile methods are an approach to development and delivery of software in smaller, shorter increments. They do this by using techniques that improve communication bandwidth & frequency using direct contact among customers, developers & the product to get continuous feedback. They also employ development approaches that try to be open to and prepared for change by facilitating change rather than trying to prevent it and developing incrementally so change is easier to manage."

What would you say in about that many words?