hedgehoglab

The year was 1999. It was my first year of University and I had a compulsory module titled "Fundamentals of Software Engineering". As a self-taught programmer, who liked to learn things by "hacking" at code, there was nothing I dreaded more than a 40-year old balding professor who was going to preach "methodologies" and talk about some language used in World War I called Ada. Why couldn't we just get on and create some cool Assembly code and hack on those spare micro-processor units?

Turns out that the professor was not that boring after all and methodologies were quite important in the real world. Between the yawn inducing talk of SSADM and boring geometry of UML, we talked about gems like No Silver Bullet, The Mythical Man Month, and other interesting discussions on real-world software delivery.

It was in this module that I learned of the then revolutionary [sic] software development methodology called Iterative Incremental Development. It just made sense! This was the real deal and I was going to conquer the world with an all new way of developing software. And then I got a real job!

The iterative incremental model was primarily championed in those days by the Rational Unified Process, which had more templates and documentation than my entire university course books combined. It was the flavour of the day, and it was meant to solve all our software engineering pains.

Fast forward nearly 10 years and the web is now filled with talk about how agile development will rescue the economy (interesting, Toyota reported their first operating loss in their 71 year history today). Heck, SCRUM is so cool, it is the only software development process where I can call someone pig and still keep a straight face.

Let me make it clear that I (and my company) believe and practise the core principles of Agile Software Development, primarily the iterative incremental development, transparency, and working systems at all stages. I have no problem with promoting and encouraging agile development, however, let's just be clear that this is nothing new. Scrum was mainstream since 2001 and iterative incremental development preceded even that.

Agile Software Development is not about tools, technology or marketing buzzwords. You don't need fancy words like sprint, card walls, or Scrum to practise an agile development process. Agile development is about people and process, and no one has a monopoly on this.

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