
Don’t get stuck.
In February 2001 the Agile Manifesto was signed by 17 people. The Manifesto is comprised of four values and 12 principles. The Manifesto acted as a lightning rod for what became the Agile movement. It provided a new framework to think about how work should or could be approached. That framework challenged the standard thinking of how software should be developed, enhanced, and maintained. 2001 was a year of transition. Even though most organizations were successful, the US economy was on the verge of a recession (the NERB tracked the 2001 recession from March 2001 to November 2001), many IT jobs were being outsourced, and the oft-quoted Chaos Reports suggested that software (and by extension hardware and systems) projects were late, over budget and did not deliver what was needed by the business. Anyone who was related to the broad software development industry had numerous war stories about projects that were death marches or abject failures. That said, all was not a wasteland. Most organizations were successful and most practitioners had also had success stories. If everything was doom and gloom most have us would have left software development, because constant failure is debilitating. Needless to say, the change was in the air in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The Agile Movement caught fire. (more…)