Agile Software: Body of Knowledge

Agile Development History

On February 11-13, 2001, 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, gathered at the Snowbird resort in Utah to form what is known now by the Agile Alliance.

However, this was just to coin the name Agile, not to say that agile methodologies were born at that time. Several agile methods had been by that time already born and applied in throughout the 1990's. Figure 1 shows the early history of Agile methods.

Figure 1.

History of agile development (adapted from Abrahamsson et al. 2003)

From the figure we can see the following observations from the history of agile methods development:

• •

  Agile methods were already in practice for more than half a decade before forming the Agile Alliance.

• •

  The first two agile methods were DSDM and Scrum.

• •

  Rapid Application Development and object-oriented development could be considered the transitional method between traditional development methods and agile methods.

• •

  Between 1998 and 2002 is the most productive period for agile methods as the Agile Alliance was formed and many agile methods came into existence.

• •

  After 2002 agile methods use in the industry has grown exponentially (Begel and Nagappan 2007,) with XP and Scrum taking the lead.