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By 2001, the software industry was in trouble—more projects were failing than
succeeding.
Customers began demanding contracts with penalties, and increasingly
sending work offshore. Some software developers, though, had increasing success with
a development process known as “lightweight.” Almost uniformly, these processes were
based on the well-known iterative, incremental process.
In February of 2001, these developers issued a manifesto—the Agile Manifesto.
The Manifesto called for Agile software development based on 4 principle values and
12 underlying principles. Two of the principles were 1.) to satisfy customers through
early and continuous delivery of working software, and 2). to deliver working software
frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the
shorter timescale.
By 2008, the Scrum Agile process was used predominantly. A simple framework, it
provided an easily adopted iterative incremental framework for software development.
It also incorporated the Agile Manifesto’s values and principles. The two authors of
Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and myself, also were among the authors of the Agile Manifesto.
I had anticipated some of the difficulties organizations (and even teams) would
face when they adopted Scrum. However, I believed that developers would bloom in
a Scrum environment. Stifled and choked by waterfall, developers would stand tall,
employing development practices, collaboration, and tooling that nobody had time to
use in waterfall projects.
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