What is Agile? Let us start with the basics, dictionary meaning of Agile is “able to move quickly and easily” or “able to think and understand quickly”. Now, if we just drag this simple dictionary meaning of this word “Agile” into the software development world, its fairly simple, “be able to deliver better software faster“. Anything to the left and right of this is nothing but gibberish.

 

Agile’s HISTORY as we know

In February 2001, 17 developers met in the Snowbird resort in Utah to discuss lightweight development methods. It took them less than a day to come up with a short list of values and they published them along with a list of practices, as the Manifesto of Agile Software Development.

 

The HISTORY of Agile’s history

What Agile truly is, is a group of software development methods that encourage constantly evolving requirements and hence the solutions and hence the PRODUCT (in our case, the software) and all this magic is pulled through by constant collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. Iterative and Incremental are a couple of key words being used, beside, adaptive planning, evolutionary development, continuous integration, continuous improvement, welcome last minute change and the list can go on and on and on… All this might sound very fancy, right? 🙂

Agile actually existed even before 2001, just that it was not formally branded, and sold in the market as it is today.

Incremental Software development methods existed as early as 1957.

Kanban – one of the flavors of agile, was implemented in the automotive manufacturing industry (Toyota) in late 1940s.

Lean – another flavor/practice in agile, can be dated back to pre-20th century and documented examples can be seen as early as Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard’s Almanack (yearly almanac published by Benjamin Franklin) says of wasted time, “He that idly loses 5s. worth of time, loses 5s., and might as prudently throw 5s. into the river.” He also stated that avoiding unnecessary costs can be more profitable that increasing sales. “A penny saved is two pence clear. A pin a-day is a groat a-year. Save and have.”

In 1974, a paper by E. A. Edmonds, introduced an adaptive software development process.

Led by Dan Gielan, New York Telephone Company’s System Development Center implemented the same methods.

Other early forms of agile implementations were introduced in 1990s such as RUP (1994), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) (1995), Scrum (1995), Crystal Clear and XP (1996), Feature Driven Development (1997), Adaptive Software Development (1997).

 

My Two Cents

All I am trying to say is that, AGILE is no rocket science, but just COMMON SENSE. And as far as it goes for the so called “agile methodology”, all it did was provide a prescriptive framework / set of written principles / or whatever you want to call it, for those who couldn’t be naturally AGILE or who found it hard to change along with the changing needs of the industry.

Someone rightly said, “Common Sense is usually uncommon in common people”. By no means, I am saying that people in general lack common sense, however, we generally tend to follow and do whatever has been done traditionally and in the process, we fail to see that our traditional methods might not be working as efficiently as they used to. And this may be because the markets have grown, people have evolved and so has the technology, there is more demand for better than the best products. We do not need any framework or set of principles to be followed, all we need to do is be open minded to find and identify the solution/method that works best for our organization and implement it to see if it truly works. In case it doesn’t, let go, and try another approach… and another… and another, till you find the right one. After all, our focus is better PRODUCT, right?

Remember, “CHANGE is the only constant thing” 🙂

– Nirbhay Gandhi