~ what is agile? ~
Let’s have some fun! Agility, what is it exactly? If we go by the Agile values we can attribute each one to something we can relate to.
London Bridge = working software over comprehensive documentation.
Slinky = responding to change over following a plan.
Red Bull pit crew = individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Derek “Del Boy” Trotter = customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
A rabbit = because they look cute and…AGILE.
~ what does agile mean? ~
Agile is an umbrella term used to describe a general approach to software development. Though there are many agile incarnations, all agile processes, including Scrum emphasize teamwork, frequent deliveries of working software, close customer collaboration, and the ability to respond quickly to change.
Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software
On Twitter, Scrum co-founder Jeff Suttherland, (@Jeff Suttherland) set a fun contest #idefineagile, to try to define what Agile meant at a tweet length of 100 characters or less. His favourite tweets used AGILE as an acronym. This is the winning definition:
A: Actively
G: Gain
I: Improvements
L: Learning
E: Everyday
Francesco Attanasio, @LeanScrumMaster
~ the origins of agile ~
An extract from the article “Writing The Agile Manifesto”:
“I can fairly accurately ascribe the origins of the Agile Alliance get together to a retreat held for various leaders in the Extreme Programming community in the Spring of 2000. Kent invited a bunch of active XPers to his rural part of Oregon to discuss various issues in XP. As well as confirmed XPers he also invited a number of people who were interested but separate to XP: such as Alistair Cockburn, Jim Highsmith, and Dave Thomas.
At the meeting we discussed the relationship between XP and other methods of a similar ilk – at the time referred to as Lightweight Methods. We agreed that XP was best as a specific process: “a stake in the ground”. We also agreed there was a lot of common ground between XP and some of these other methods. As a result of this (Uncle) Bob Martin decided to try to put together a meeting of people interested in this broader range of methods.
A wide range of people were contacted, basically whoever we thought was interested and active in this field. I’m sure we missed some people who would have been interested and valuable had they come, but we did try to cover as wide a ground as we could. After much discussion we settled on a meeting at Snowbird Utah from February 13-11-2001. Several of the people who were keen to come couldn’t make it – in the end those that did were the 17 whose names appear on the manifesto.”
~ the history of agile ~
On February 13-11, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people met to talk, ski, relax, and try to find common ground and of course, to eat. What emerged was the Agile Software Development Manifesto.
Representatives from Extreme Programming, Scrum, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, and others sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes convened.
They discussed the growing field of what used to be called lightweight methods; and decided to use the term agile to describe this new breed of agile methods.
Since then, the Agile Movement, with all its values, principles, methods, practices, tools, champions and practitioners, philosophies and cultures, has significantly changed the landscape of the modern software engineering and commercial software development in the Internet era.