Chapter 1: TheOrigins of Agile and Lightweight Methodologies

This chapter briefly touches on why agile concepts, values, and principles evolved to address issues with traditional plan-driven and linear sequential software development models. Driven by software engineers, the goal of agile is to eliminate the complexities, inefficiencies, and inflexibility of the traditional software development models.

This chapter explains where the traditional waterfall approach often fails due to its emphasis on detailed planning and the execution of deterministic life cycle development processes. Not everything about the traditional software development model is bad, especially with its historical emphasis on developing and applying mature business analysis and engineering practices. In this chapter, you will learn how the values and principles of agile help address the many problems associated with the traditional software development model while understanding the importance of maintaining rigor in developing your business and engineering practices.

While this is a book about scaling Scrum on an enterprise scale, we need to first understand Scrum's agile underpinnings, and why Scrum needs to be scaled.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

With those objectives in mind, this chapter provides an introduction to the lightweight methodologies that preceded the development and promotion of "agile" concepts, values, and principles. Those early efforts addressed the limitations of the traditional development model and also helped refine the concepts that ultimately defined what it means to be agile. In this chapter, you will also learn why engineers largely led the initial movements to implement agile-based practices.