Your applications need to meet business needs, overcome complex processes, and provide instant results to customers. And, ideally, they’ll require minimal rework on your part. The first step to success is requirements definition. Here, Filip Szymanski offers some tips from agile methods that will improve your requirements—even if you haven’t otherwise adopted agile.

Daryl Kulak explains that if we don't ask the right question at the beginning of the project, then no matter how well we answer, it won't be helpful. Perhaps the biggest difference between agile and waterfall is the question being asked. The scope of the project and any judgments of progress are related to this very fundamental question.

Matthew Gelbwaks writes that rather than applying a strategy to agile, you should apply the principles and values of agile to business or organizational strategy. Agile is the new way to compete and the new way to win at every level of the organization—from development to strategy.

If you asked anyone on my team what agile practice is most responsible for our success over the past eight years, I bet they'd say retrospectives. But I wonder if it's not so much the retrospectives themselves, as the "small experiments" (to borrow Linda Rising's term) we perform to try to address our problem areas.