Development and Evolution of Agile – Changes in a World of Change

Thomas J. Marlowe, Vassilka Kirova, Garett Chang, Omer Hashmi, Stephen P. Masticola

Agile software development is an approach first codified in the Agile Manifesto in 2001. This was a statement of core values that became associated with a set of principles and practices. Key ideas include early and constant customer involvement, self-organizing teams that embrace change, rapid delivery of value, short timeboxed iterations coordinated by a shared list of items—a product backlog and driven by user stories and use cases, clean code, test-driven development, and continuous integration. The values, principles, and practices have permeated the technical and business world, translated and modified to fit many domains, affecting both production and management. But as with any good idea, agility can be misinterpreted, or used when inappropriate. Even a proper implementation must be tempered with good understanding of the domain, overall context, and appropriateness of selected agile practices, and modified to fit the enterprise, the domain, and the problem. In this paper, we briefly trace the evolution of agile methods, placing them within a wider organizational framework, and offer guidelines for their use.

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