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Software Engineering
20 Years of the Agile Manifesto
Reflections on two decades of Agility practice
On February 11–13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people met to talk, ski, relax, and try to find common ground — and of course, to eat. What emerged was the Agile ‘Software Development’ Manifesto. Representatives from Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, and others sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes convened.
February 2021 is the 20th anniversary of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development — a revolution in the software market and an influence across many industries.
Even if the manifesto has not changed, the application of its understanding varies from place to place. I’ve been working with Agile software development for more than a decade. During this period, as a freelance engineer I have witnessed over ten companies using agility —all implementing it differently.
I have seen:
- Teams that dropped out estimation because they did not see a concrete benefit from it.
- A scrum master who did not allow any story to be added to a sprint if it was not ready and missing some details according to at least one developer. By applying this constraint, the team ended spending about 30% of its time discussing clarity, readiness, and estimating stories. The experience was stressful for the product owner who was accused of not doing his job properly and preparing poorly-described stories.
- A developer was accused of being against scrum because they have improved the UI and cleaned code, which wasn’t required in the stories planned for that sprint.
- People interpreting agility as a room for creativity and a method where you can show your new ideas and challenge the existing state.
- A scrum team with about 13 members: UX designer, testers, devOps, backend, frontend, iOS, and Android developers. All the developers in that team were taking part in estimation meetings for every story. Then, to…
