Many people believe Agile to just be ‘the latest management fad’. Very often they scoff at the idea of becoming Agile because ‘something else will come along soon and replace it’. Well today I want to raise the retort, that it won’t be, and that it’s actually been around for a very long time, you just didn’t know it.

Officially, Agile was born in February of 2001 when 17 developers all met at a resort in Snowbird, Utah to talk about their frustration of building software that just didn’t deliver on what the user needs. So they put their minds together to come up with 4 values and 12 principles by which they would like to live by when building software going forward, and so the Agile Manifesto was born. That was 17 years ago and in the grand scheme of things that’s pretty new, but in the world of technology that’s ancient. In that time frame, entire technologies were born, gained mainstream usage and deprecated by new technology (R.I.P WAP). So the fact that Agile has stuck around this long in an industry that moves faster than any other in history, should be the first alarm bell that isn’t going anywhere soon.

But I’m not going to be talking about how much longer Agile will be around, because Agile in it’s branded form might not be around for long, I’m not a soothsayer I don’t know. What I do want to do, is to help hopefully at least one person understand that the core values and principles that Agile believes in all stem from something that we have all known for a very long time and the majority have forgotten, the ever elusive, common sense. To do that, I’m going to take you on a guided tour through history to look at some incredibly successful projects from the 50’s, 40’s and 30’s, all of which were delivered following a set of values which match very closely to Agile and other ‘modern’ methodologies.