Written by Charles
Dearing
The software industry was facing a crisis at
the turn of the century. Businesses were in need of software applications, but
software application development as a whole was lagging. Development times were
ballooning, simple applications taking years and years to complete.
Bloated
development times cost too much
A slow and steady pace would have been
acceptable in the past, but now business needs were accelerating. A business
that enlisted a software development team to complete a project within a
five-year time span was a different business by the end of year three.
Inevitably, projects were abandoned, capital wasted, and talent frittered away.
A new way to approach software development was
very badly needed. In those days, software development was done in a slow,
methodical way. Software engineers and their collaborators crafted hundreds of
pages of project requirements, securing vendors, checking timelines, and
conducting thorough research. Then, once the plan was made, the team stuck to
it -- at all costs, both literal and metaphorical.
Agile
is created to address growing problems
Then a group of rebel programmers changed
everything, and quite possibly, saved the software application development
industry. A group of freethinking software professionals created the Agile Manifesto which flew in the
face of everything software development stood for at the time. "We are
uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do
it," the Agile Manifesto opens.
The Agile Manifesto called for an iterative,
successive approach to software development. They eschewed extensive
documentation and welcomed change even late in development. They stressed the
importance of self-organized, self-motivated, self-directed teams. They
pioneered the "constant delivery" framework, a framework that has not only
survived but thrived in modern project management contexts.
Agile environments value:
- Individuals and interactions over
processes and tools
- Working software over
comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over
contract negotiation
- Responding to change over
following a plan
The agile
methodology calls for constant and continuous delivery as
the primary measure of project success and progress. Before the agile
methodology took hold, simply following the rubric, the unchanging schedule
laid out at the beginning of the project, was the measure of progress. The
Agile Manifesto requires a results-based tracking system, a system that has
forever changed project management.
Agile
changes everything due to its success
Agile quickly became a go-to project
management methodology for software professionals. There were some detractors
and some slow to adopt, but ultimately, agile percolated into the tech sector.
Agile has become the defacto project
management philosophy of the startup ecosystem. What's more impressive is that
agile is seeing wider adoption outside of the tech industry. Agile principles
have proven to be easy to apply to any and all project management environments.
As agile becomes a more accepted method of
tracking project success, innovations within it begin to emerge. One notable
offshoot of agile is Kanban, a method inspired by Japanese management styles.
Doubtless, you've seen the now-cliched startup offices with weary whiteboards
covered in sticky notes. This is a representation of a kind of "just-in-time"
task management system where essential tasks are broken up into tiny ones and
dealt with as they arise.
Sprints, scrum, and DevOps are other terms
you've most likely encountered in your project management experience. These are
terms that owe their existence to the agile philosophy. Sprints are essentially
iterative project retrospectives.
These retrospectives are done every month or
so and help the team correct course and adopt revisions (just as the Agile
Manifesto recommends). Scrum is a project
management framework built from agile that uses sprints
to improve iterations. DevOps is a melding of operations and development, a
type of collaborative culture ripped right out of the agile framework.
Conclusion
"By now most business leaders are familiar
with agile innovation teams," Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Andy Noble
write for the Harvard Business Review, noting the popularity of the project management method.
"These small, entrepreneurial groups are
designed to stay close to customers and adapt quickly to changing conditions,"
the writers continue. "When implemented correctly, they almost always result in
higher team productivity and morale, faster time to market, better quality, and
lower risk than traditional approaches can achieve."
Agile project management has come quite a long
way. When the Agile Manifesto was released, it called for common sense
development environments. Little did the underwriters of the pamphlet know,
their principles of iterative development and self-motivated, self-directed,
and collaborative teams would apply to project management as a whole.
Agile project management will continue to
evolve as new companies adopt the principles and adapt them to their own
specific needs. Companies, large and small, will continue to change how we
understand agile project management and how we can best apply agile principles.
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About the Author
Charles
Dearing is a veteran tech and marketing journalist with over 15 years of
experience using words to move people to act. He has written for various
publications such as ProBlogger, Big Think, Apps World, to name a few.