The Software Industry and the Agile Manifesto

Towards the end of the last century, the software industry was in a state of turmoil. There were some significant software project failures, which were having a substantial reputational impact on the industry as a whole. One observation was that software projects over a certain size were more likely to fail.

In this chapter, we'll discuss the factors that led to a crisis and the subsequent major turning-point in the software industry. In the second part of this chapter, we'll introduce the Agile Manifesto and its origins and discuss the way it revolutionized the way we think about building software. We'll explain the Manifesto's values and principles, what they each mean, and the impact they have on how software professionals work.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Why the software industry needed to change
• The origins of the Agile Manifesto
• A detailed look at the values and principles of the manifesto and how they translate to today's context
• Adaptive versus predictive planning
• Incremental versus waterfall delivery
• Agile isn't a process, it's a mindset built on guiding values/principles and requires solid technical practices