A Behind the Scenes Look at the Writing of the Agile Manifesto

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2024-11-05 21:00:06

It’s February 2021 and we are celebrating 20 years since the writing of the Agile Manifesto. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what happened back in Snowbird 2001 when 17 software development thought leaders authored the Agile Manifesto.

Let’s first go back another 10 years to explore what was happening in the 1990s. In the late 80s and early 90s, Kent Beck, the creator of XP or extreme programming, worked with Ward Cunningham, the creator of the first wiki, on better approaches to developing software. Kent got to refine and evolve a lot of these practices along with Ron Jeffries and later Martin Fowler while working on the C3 project at Chrysler and it was at that time that the group raised awareness of these practices via the wiki as well as Kent’s first XP book. James Grenning also got exposed to XP in the late 90s and took a particular interest in applying the XP practices to embedded devices. We will refer to this group of Agile Manifesto authors as the XP contingent.

Around the same time, on the east coast in Boston, Jeff Sutherland was experimenting with different approaches to managing projects based on lean thinking and ideas from the New New Product Development Game by Takeuchi and Nonaka. Ken Schwaber was coming up with something similar based on complex process control theory and his work at DuPont Advanced Research facility. Ken and Jeff collaborated to create Scrum and introduced it at an OOPSLA conference in 1995. Mike Beedle was probably one of the first scrum practitioners that helped them validate and evolve the framework. We will refer to this group of Agile Manifesto authors as the Scrum contingent.