The movement to more agile development approaches began in the 1990s. Several alternative methodologies to the waterfall approach were introduced at that time, including the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), extreme programming, and Feature-Driven Development (FDD). Formal definitions of agile and DevOps principles were created during the following decade.

As time passed, growing emphasis was placed on defining and building smaller components delivered in shorter time increments. Today, delivery of incremental improvements can appear to be nearly continuous, especially when compared to earlier methods.

A typical agile development cycle includes the gathering of new requirements, design, development, quality assurance testing, deployment, release, and tracking and monitoring. To speed development, some organizations use automated testing procedures and tools for quality assurance. Testing can occur at the component or unit level.

The following diagram illustrates this typical development cycle:

The cycle is shown as continuous since it repeats itself for each incremental building process. Development teams have taken to using tools such as Cloud Foundry and OpenShift as development and runtime environments in support of this approach. Classic development tools such as Visual Studio have evolved to support agile development efforts.

One of today's more popular approaches to agile development is called scrum. Since agile development is best performed when small teams focus on building the software components, scrum teams are usually limited to fewer than 10 members. Team direction comes from the product or project owner and scrum master. Software components are developed and delivered in sprints of short duration, usually of 1 to 3 weeks in length. The components are held in a version control repository such as GitHub and are continuously integrated together (with tools such as Jenkins) as they are being built.