![Agile Software Development Method (noun) [Word Notes] — Hacking Humans cover](https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/31cbfa00-7c58-11f0-b038-6bdeffca97b0/image/441b0ca2db080b93b935568d381ce462.png?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress)
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You're listening to the Cyberwire Network powered.
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By N2K.
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The word is Agile Software development method spelled agile as in the ability to move quickly and freely software as in computer programs designed to perform well defined functions development as in the people, process and technology used in creating, designing, deploying and supporting software and method as in a particular procedure for accomplishing a task. A software development philosophy that emphasizes incremental delivery, team collaboration, continual planning, and continual learning. Example Sentence Agile is a mindset that drives an approach to software development. Origin and context in 1956, Herbert Bennington invented the first version of the waterfall software development method. Interestingly, Bennington didn't get credit for his work early on. Another guy, Dr. Winston Royce, in 1970 got the credit when he published a criticism of the model that didn't even mention it by name, but the paper had nice diagrams that showed the process, requirements, analysis, design, implementation, testing, and operations all flowing from top to bottom just like a waterfall. In 1976, Bell and Taylor referred to the Royce diagrams as the Waterfall model, and the name stuck to Dr. Royce. In 1985, the US Department of Defense adopted the waterfall model as a requirement for all contractors despite Royce's criticism, and started a period of ponderous, iceberg like progress in producing software. The impact was that many programming projects took years to finish, and the team spent as much time documenting their requirements as they did writing code. In the 1990s, some rebel developers started experimenting with ways to improve the process. They began toying with the Rational unified process in 1994, the scrum in 1995, and extreme programming in 1996. But in February 2001, 17 men and yes, they were all men. We can have a longer discussion later, but about the misogyny of the IT community. In the early 2000s, they all traveled to Utah for a long weekend of skiing and discussions about building software. The result was the Agile Manifesto, a rejection of the waterfall model and an embracement of the idea of producing real working code as a milestone of progress. The manifesto laid out four key individuals and interactions over process and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract, negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. The Agile method helped push big software development ideas like infrastructure as code, DevOps and DevSecOps. And the impact was that the waterfall method produced new code once every three years or so. The Agile method made it possible for 10 new deployments a day. Nerd Reference In 2009, Stanford University's E Corner interviewed Barbara Liskoff, one of computing science's founding mothers who received the association of Computing Machinery's Turing Award in 2008 for her contributions to solving the software crisis of the 1980s. She had this to say about her work and the work done by others to solve the problem.
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I was at NIDRR and they do research for the government and I was asked to look into this problem that the government was interested in, namely what to do about the software crisis. So the software crisis was people would build big programs and they wouldn't work. They spend millions of dollars, hundreds of man years, and in the end they'd have to scrap the whole thing. And actually, in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, you could read in the newspaper about these fiascos. Companies such and such spend all this money and now they've had to throw the whole thing away. So the software crisis was a really big problem. And I was asked to start thinking about this. And so I started to look into this field. It's called programming methodology. Of course, I read all the papers that existed and there were some really good people working in that field. There was Edsger Dijkstra, Tony Hoare, Dave Parnas. I mean, these were very good people. And they were writing papers about how do you break up a program into pieces so that you can reason about it. The problem that they were worried about was software programs are huge. They were huge then, millions of lines of code. They're even bigger today. There's no way that you can make sense of something that big. You have to have a way of breaking it up into small pieces that you can work on independently, reason about independently, and that somehow you put the whole thing together and it works. And nobody knew how to do that.
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Wordnotes was written by Sammy Diggs and Tim Nodar, executive produced by Peter Kilping and edited by John Petrick and me, Rick Howard. The mix, sound, design and original music have all been crafted by the ridiculously talented Elliot Peltzman. Thanks for listening.
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