”What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” (via Martin Fowler):
IID [iterative and incremental development] grew from the 1930s work of Walter Shewhart, a quality expert at Bell Labs who proposed a series of short “plan-do-study-act” (PDSA) cycles for quality improvement. ... The X-15 hypersonic jet was a milestone 1950s project applying IID ... [which] seeded NASA's early 1960s Project Mercury ... Project Mercury ran with very short (half-day) iterations that were time boxed. The development team conducted a technical review of all changes, and, interestingly, applied the Extreme Programming practice of test-first development, planning and writing tests before each micro-increment.
Gerald M. Weinberg, who worked on the project, ... wrote:
We were doing incremental development as early as 1957 ... [I] remember Herb Jacobs ... developing a large simulation for Motorola, where the technique used was, as far as I can tell, indistinguishable from XP.
I'll just add, this isn't a slam on XP at all. In the introductory work on XP, Kent Beck admits XP is not really anything new:
None of the ideas in XP are new. Most are as old as programming. There is a sense in which XP is conservative -- all its techniques have been proven.
My own paper on XP includes some additional references supporting agileishness from the Mythical Man-Month and Steve McConnell's Code Complete.
June 2021: Some updates from a recent Twitter thread started here.
- The Original Skunk Works, talk by Nick Means. (see also AgileAirplaneDesign).
- Real Software Engineering, talk by Glenn Vanderburg.
- On War by Clausewitz (Wikipedia).
- The entirety of agile is predicated upon Col. Boyd's work with the “OODA Loop” for the Air Force's fighter pilots. (from @gortok). (Boyd's Biography)
- “You can not inspect quality into a product.” - Harold F. Dodge
- Lean Manufacturing
tags: ComputersAndTechnology AgileDevelopment
