While agile methods are in use in industry, little research has been undertaken into what is meant by agility and how a supposed agile method can be evaluated with regard to its veracity to belong to this category of software development methodological approaches. Here, an analytical framework, called 4-DAT, is developed and applied to six well-known agile methods and, for comparison, two traditional methods. The results indicate the degree of agility to be found in each method, from which a judgement can be made as to whether the appellation of ''agile'' to that method is appropriate. This information is shown to be useful, for example, when constructing a methodology from method fragments (method engineering) and when comparing agile and traditional methods.