Agile also enables early identification of project failures, said Mironov, but he also stressed that agile will not please everyone on the development team. "I haven't seen [anybody] go through a transformation where everybody came out the other side happy," he said. "You'll lose some folks because it's not a style fit or they weren't very good and you may not fit with agile. Expect some fallout or some people who need to move to the part of the organization that's not going this way."

Meanwhile, involving remote development teams in agile projects will necessitate use of collaborative software tools.

An audience member stressed how agile can face opposition.

"My experience with agile is there's a lot of resistance to it because it's not the way we've done things before," said Ryan Grisso, software engineering manager at NetSuite, which uses an agile approach and makes a hosted business application.

Scrum, one of the more popular agile methods, was touted by speaker Johnny Scarborough, vice president of product engineering at GlobalLogic, which provides software development services.