The agile approach combines responsive, collaborative people with a focus on demonstrable, concrete targets. That’s the spirit of agility. The practical emphasis of development shifts. Report from a plan-based approach, where key events happen in individual, separate episodes, to a more natural, continuous style.
Embracing change by understanding the needs of the business: Agility comes about by embracing change, and learning from and with the business. With this in mind agile defines the ability to adapt and be flexible, to embrace change. Agile teams embrace change and actively identify changes in applications that will increase business value.
Focusing on the business value and return on investment (ROI): Agile development is a development mind shift and a refocusing of efforts and priorities. The tools, project methodologies, and programming methods can certainly go some way to help one become agile, but it is the ability to apply these techniques to an ever-changing business that will truly reap the rewards.
Continuous delivery via incremental and iterative development: Being agile is all about delivering working software of value as often as possible. Success of software development is not measured in the amount of design work. Businesses measure success in working software; this should be your measure of progress as well.