Historical Roots of Agile Methods: Where did “Agile Thinking” Come from?

Abbas, N., Gravell, A. and Wills, G. (2008) Historical Roots of Agile Methods: Where did “Agile Thinking” Come from? In: Agile processes and eXtreme programming in Software Engineering, 10-14 june 2008, Limerick, Ireland.

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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.

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