Agile & Scrum: A Brief History

Snow Bird, Utah (snowbird.com)

Precursors of the 1990’s

[source]

Snow Bird

“On February 11-13, 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…. What emerged was the Agile ‘Software Development’ Manifesto.”

agilemanifesto.org

Agile Manifesto

Participants

  • Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Bob Martin, Stephen Mellor, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, and Dave Thomas

Original purpose

“to get all the lightweight method leaders in one room”
  • Lightweight methodologies:
  • Extreme Programming
  • Adaptive Software Development
  • Crystal
  • SCRUM

Result

  • Publication of “a set of values based on trust and respect for each other and promoting organizational models based on people, collaboration, and building the types of organizational communities in which [developers] would want to work,” “freed from the baggage of Dilbertesque corporations,” where “marketing, or management, or external customers, internal customers, and, yes, even developers—don’t want to make hard trade-off decisions, so they impose irrational demands through the imposition of corporate power structures”
  • A mushrooming of Agile-based methodologies and their adoption throughout numerous industries

Offshoots

TDD – Test Driven Development (Kent Beck)

Planning Poker (James Grenning)

Lean Software Development (Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck)

Famous Examples

Thriving Companies Using Agile

  • Google
  • Spotify
  • 3M
  • IBM
  • ANZ

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