Historical roots of Agile Methods: Where did “Agile Thinking” come from?

Resource type
Authors/contributors
Title
Historical roots of Agile Methods: Where did “Agile Thinking” come from?
Abstract
The appearance of Agile methods has been the most noticeable change to software process thinking in the last fifteen years [16], but in fact many of the “Agile ideas” have been around since 70’s or even before. Many studies and reviews have been conducted about Agile methods which ascribe their emergence as a reaction against traditional methods. In this paper, we argue that although Agile methods are new as a whole, they have strong roots in the history of software engineering. In addition to the iterative and incremental approaches that have been in use since 1957 [21], people who criticised the traditional methods suggested alternative approaches which were actually Agile ideas such as the response to change, customer involvement, and working software over documentation. The authors of this paper believe that education about the history of Agile thinking will help to develop better understanding as well as promoting the use of Agile methods. We therefore present and discuss the reasons behind the development and introduction of Agile methods, as a reaction to traditional methods, as a result of people’s experience, and in particular focusing on reusing ideas from history.
Date
2008
Proceedings Title
Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Pages
94-103
Series
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing
Language
en
ISBN
978-3-540-68255-4
Short Title
Historical Roots of Agile Methods
Library Catalogue
Springer Link
Citation
Abbas, N., Gravell, A. M., & Wills, G. B. (2008). Historical roots of Agile Methods: Where did “Agile Thinking” come from? In P. Abrahamsson, R. Baskerville, K. Conboy, B. Fitzgerald, L. Morgan, & X. Wang (Eds.), Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming (pp. 94–103). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.