One of the biggest myths about agile methods are that teams who use agile can do just about anything they want. While agile methods promote team empowerment, they also expect the team to act responsibly. In corporate environments, this means that the project may have to follow corporate standards and guidelines, such as using standard tools, capturing and reporting specific metrics, and even following rigid accounting rules. So, while the team has flexibility, it must exercise that flexibility within a set of constraints. Other constraints that most projects face are meeting a fixed budget, and hitting specific target dates.

Agile methods give the teams tools for executing under these constraints in a manner that reduces the risk of violating the constraints, by allowing the team to be flexible in how they behave in order to meet the constraint. For example, to meet a hard deliverable deadline, the work/feature prioritization aspects of agile give the team the possibility of dropping lower-priority scope (if necessary) in order to make that date.

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