I have been in practice with the famous agile software development process called "Scrum" for more than a year. I have had the opportunity to see a SCRUM team developing from scratch in a completely start-up environment.
I will point to the two aspects as,
1. Management aspects.
2. Technical aspects.
1. Management aspects
I encapsulate the things like working on a story by story basis, standing up for daily status update meeting, producing deliveries in short iterations and without much of prior planning into this group. I believe this aspect heavily depends on the way the second aspect is handled.
2. Technical aspects
Technical aspects encapsulate the practice of Test Driven Development, continuous and periodic Refactoring and other hard core technical things like this. Despite the truth that, this aspect is not the much anticipated by the client, being "Agile" there is no alternative to achieve what is anticipated, "Business value", without this.
Developing Software falls into the category of craftsmanship. So, its hard to define the line and expect the players to stop on a referee's whistle. With agility, developers are free to add their creative inputs to the software design and code base. So, without attention to the technical aspects may lead to a process of "Iterative Incrementation Destruction" instead of "Iterative Incremental Develeopment".
In subsequent posts I will try to come up with actual examples in favor of first making the "techi" things right.
Visit www.scrumalliance.org for Scrum related knowledge.
