Agile ... in 1976

I'm aging myself here, whatever.

We talk about Agile as if it's a new idea, the fact of the matter is that the principles have been around for a long time. A little story is order.

It was my first job in IT, a great opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new industry and I wanted to make the best of it. I had put in a lot of time as a operator (we had those then), did a few small programming assignments from time to time and now my time had arrived, I was asked to do a full system, an A/P rewrite. Unfortunately I also had to do my operations job so I went about it the best way I knew how. I took an incremental approach to requirement collection (call it a scrum backlog list), I did a number of small increments (call it a sprint) and I did it  quickly, in like 30 days.

So what allowed me to get it done so quickly. Well I have to admit that I was too young and too naive to understand what I was doing, but it clearly worked. I simply did what came naturally. I asked about requirements as they came up, I incrementally programmed the system and I adjusted on the fly.

What does this tell us about Agile? I think it's pretty simple and straight forward. It's the natural way of things.