“An agile environment is one that’s adaptive and promotes evolutionary development and continuous improvement. It fosters flexibility and champions fast failures. Perhaps most importantly, it helps software development teams build and deliver optimal solutions as rapidly as possible. That’s because in today’s competitive market chock-full of tech-savvy customers used to new apps and app updates every day and copious amounts of data with which to work, IT teams can no longer respond to IT requests with months-long development cycles. It doesn’t matter if the request is from a product manager looking to map the next rev’s upgrade or a data scientist asking for a new analytics model.” Tom Phelan ( February 10, 2015 )