Key elements for the success of the most popular Agile methods

The Agile methodology, who knew a significant increase in influence and use by the IT development industry in the past two decades, is based on various newer or older methods. This paper will identify and describe the most popular and used methods belonging to Agile methodology based on published surveys by VersionOne in the last three years. During methods presentation, the main elements that make these methods so successful will be highlighted. The approach proposed is to identify these distinctive elements of each popular method and not to compare these key elements but rather to point out their complementary capabilities. This is a pre-requisite for a future study to propose a new Agile method based on these key elements.