Agile From First Principles

2 THE ORIGINS OF AGILE

Agile emerged as a response to a myriad of processes, influences and ideas dating back decades

Agile didn’t begin as a single idea or as the product of a single person’s experience – it evolved over decades, and we can trace elements of Agile to numerous other ideas, approaches, concepts and theories dating back as far as the 1600s. However, it was at a single event in 2001 when the word ‘Agile’ came to be applied to these things.

The mid-20th century saw the early days of software development, and the methods being used tended to mirror those of earlier manufacturing and hardware approaches. They were linear, with each aspect of development being completed before the next would begin. This made sense with hardware, ...