Project Management vs. Agile Software Development

I often mix up project management with agile software development, so I looked both up to sort out the differences. I found both of these topics on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. There are tons of supporting links, so check it out if you want to dig deeper.

Project Management

Project management is the ensemble of activities concerned with successfully achieving a set of goals. This includes planning, scheduling and maintaining progress of the activities that comprise the project. Reduced to its simplest project management is the discipline of maintaining the risk of failure at as low a value as necessary over the lifetime of the project. Risk of failure arises primarily from the presence of uncertainty at all stages of a project. List of project management topics.

Agile Software Development

In software engineering, agile software development or agile methods refers to low-overhead methodologies that accept that software is difficult to control. They minimize risk by ensuring that software engineers focus on smaller units of work. One way in which agile software development is generally distinguished from "heavier", more process-centric methodologies, for example the waterfall model, is by its emphasis on values and principles, rather than on processes. Typical cycles are one week or one month, and at the end of each cycle they reevaluate the project priorities - a feature it shares with iterative development methodologies, and most moderntheories of project management.

Extreme Programming

Extreme Programming (XP) is a method in or approach to software engineering, formulated by Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, and Ron Jeffries. Kent Beck wrote the first book on the topic, Extreme Programming Explained, published in 1999. It is the most popular of several agile software development methodologies. The generalizationof extreme programming to other types of projects is extreme project management.