The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER ONE

What Is Agile?

Agile is everywhere. And paradoxically, nowhere.

In the 20 years after the Agile freight train roared into software developers’ consciousness, the number of companies calling themselves “Agile” increased by orders of magnitude. The number of teams actually taking an agile approach to their work? Not so much. “Agile,” the easily repeated name, is enormously successful. The ideas behind Agile—well, most of them are ignored.

Let’s fix that.

Agile’s Genesis

In the 1990s, software development was believed to be in crisis. They actually called it that: “The Software Crisis.” Software projects were overbudget, late, didn’t meet requirements, and—according to the oft-quoted and ominously named “CHAOS Report”—nearly one-third of them were cancelled outright. [Standish1994]

Agile wasn’t a response to this crisis. Far from it. Agile was a response to the response.

To bring software development under control, big organizations had created highly detailed processes that defined exactly how software was to be created. Everything was tightly controlled so that no mistakes could be made. (In theory, anyway.)

First, business analysts would interview stakeholders and document the system requirements. Next, software architects would read the requirements documents and create detailed design documents specifying every component of the system and how they related to one another. Then programmers would convert the design documents to code. In some organizations, this was ...