The origin of agile software development
In 2001, a group of 17 software developers reunited (among them, the creators of the first wiki, scrum, and Extreme Programming) and wrote The Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Following its proposed philosophy, the manifesto is concise and short, highlighting individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and responding to change to be more valuable than many antiquated precepts that have made software development more cumbersome than it should.
Furthermore, they established the 12 core principles of agile software development. They emphasized that delivering working software and meeting the ever-changing requirements, among others, should be the priorities for the development team.
From the manifesto, several agile methodologies surfaced. Two of the most famous being extreme programming (XP), where two developers sit side by side to help each other think and debug code much faster, and scrum, which has the development team working in iterations called “sprints,” each of them resulting in a working version of the software.
It’s about agility, not “agile”
Years later, thousands of software development companies would go on to include “agile” on their name and recruitment requirements. Books and seminaries appeared and had the whole expanse of their objectives revolving around the word “agile,” while completely ignoring its principles (which were, by definition, against making things more complex than they should be). Furthermore, an “Agile Alliance” would surface, alongside many other organizations and sellers of certificates that assured that their students were suddenly masters of “agile” development.
Seeing this, in 2014, Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer and one of the signatories of the manifesto, recounted his experiences starting from the date the manifesto was written.
The whole intention of the principles he and the other 16 developers created was to free programmers of the unnecessary burdens of following strict processes, being shackled to particular frameworks or tools and, how he’d put it, help developers “break free some of the wasteful and soul-destroying practices of the ’80s and ’90s.” He made public his disregard for the “agile” world we all started to live in, as he was sure that it was all against the spirit of the document that started the whole movement.
One of the key takeaways from Dave’s words is that many shrewd salesmen have benefited from selling books and certificates titled things like “Do Agile Right” and “Agile for Dummies,” when in reality the idea was to focus on agility.
“Agile” is not a noun, it’s an adjective, and it must qualify something else. “Do Agile Right” is like saying “Do Orange Right.” – Dave Thomas.
Confirming what had become of the industry, dubbing products as “agile” became a pretext to charge customers or to disregard perfectly capable software developers. Dave reinstated that doing things in an agile context simply means aiming for the highest value, while making changes in the future easier to handle.
“Agile” developers don’t exist, but rather developers who program with agility or who know how to employ tools that improve their agility. By focusing on this way of thinking, developers can start to distance themselves from attractive and costly labels and just focus on the work that matters: Gaining experience and delivering quality software.
Since he started spreading his insight on the new world of programming, Thomas has gone on to spread the idea that developers should stop using the word “agile,” and leave it to those who just want to buy and sell products or brands. Instead, working with agility should be the idea behind modern software development.
