A Brief History of Agile: A Mindset for Product Development

It is amazing to think that the Agile approach to developing products has been around in various forms for many years. Some would say the mindset can be found in the Scientific Method that Francis Bacon developed in the 1620’s. Agile has taken root as the defacto mindset to have when building a product with unknown customer needs and a need to discover ways to build it. Agile’s dominance comes after many years of failed products developed using a methodology that worked when the customer needs and knowledge of how to build it are well known. Rarely was this the case for the products being developed.

Below is a timeline of some major events that have helped lead us to the Agile mindset for product development. There are many more contributions, but I believe these are the major events:

• 1620 – Scientific Method from Francis Bacon
  • Pose a question, gather information, form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and share knowledge. Sounds like an Agile mindset.
• 1930 – Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) by Walter Shewhart
  • This takes the Scientific Method and adds the “Act” component to enable integration of knowledge to form a cycle.
• 1948 – Toyota Production System (precursor to “Lean Manufacturing”)
  • A framework for conserving resources by eliminating waste. People who participate in the system learn to identify expenditures of material, effort and time that do not generate value for customers.
• 1950’s – Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) by W. Edwards Deming
  • Building off PDCA, Deming wanted to bring more attention to the fact that the “Study” phase was about analysis. He felt that “Check” emphasized inspection over analysis.
• 1976 – Evolutionary Project Management by Tom Gilb
  • His material was probably the first with a clear flavor of agile, light, and adaptive iteration with quick results. He stated that, “a complex system will be most successful if it is implemented in small steps and if each step has a clear measure of successful achievement as well as a “retreat” possibility to a previous successful step upon failure.“
  • Approach cited in Software Metrics.
• 1985 – “A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancements” by Barry Boehm
  • Formalized and made prominent with a risk-driven iterations concept and the need to use a discrete step of risk assessment in each iteration. Higher risk items were worked on earlier than lower risk items.
• 1986 – The New New Product Development Game by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka
  • Presented a holistic approach taken by product developers within a few select companies with six characteristics: built-in instability, self-organizing project teams, overlapping development phases, “multilearning,” subtle control, and organizational transfer of learning.
• 1990 – Rapid Application Development teachings by James Martin
  • Approach to software development that put less emphasis on planning and more emphasis on an adaptive process. Prototypes are often used in addition to or sometimes even in place of design specifications.
• 1995 – Scrum framework presented by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland in 1995 at OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications) Conference
  • “A framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Scrum is grounded in empirical process control theory, employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk.” – Scrum Guide
• 1999 – “eXtreme Programming (XP): Explained” by Kent Beck
  • Emphasized communication, simplicity, testing, and sustainable developer-oriented practices. Advocates frequent “releases” in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
• 2001 – Agile Manifesto
  • 17 developers known as “organizational anarchists” met for 3 days in Snowbird, UT because they were successfully producing software in an iterative and incremental manner as opposed to using a waterfall methodology. They wanted to share their ideas that allowed their methods to work significantly better. They forged the Agile Manifesto with its 4 key values and 12 operating principles that captured the essence of their methods.
• 2007 – Discussion of Kanban at Agile 2007
  • A lean method to manage and improve work across human systems. This approach aims to manage work by balancing the demands with available capacity and improving the handling of system level bottlenecks.

As you can see, the application of an Agile mindset for developing products has been around for some time. While there may be passionate debates about the Agile mindset history, its roots extend far beyond Information Technology (IT) and will continue to grow into every function of every industry that wants to improve their innovation process.