History

Gilb started some Evo practices in the early 1960s, while consulting (and living) primarily in Europe. In 1976, he wrote about iterative development, evolutionary delivery, and evolutionary project management in his book, Software Metrics. This was rather unique in a period dominated by waterfall lifecycle promotion. In the late 1970s, he authored a series of column articles in Computer Weekly UK that reiterated and further explored these practices; these articles are arguably the earliest popular press on the subject of IID and adaptive, evolutionary development.

In April 1981, Gilb published "Evolutionary Development" in ACM Software Engineering Notes, and in July 1985 published "Evolutionary Delivery versus the 'Waterfall Model'" ACM Sigsoft Software Requirements Engineering Notes. These are some of the earliest ACM or IEEE publications related to the subject of IID and adaptive, evolutionary development.

In the 1980s he was also exposed to the work of Deming, and realized that Deming's values and Shewhart's PDSA model captured the intent of Evo.

As mentioned in the introduction, in 1988 Gilb published Principles of Software Engineering Management, a milestone early book describing an adaptive, iterative, and evolutionary process, well ahead of its time.

Since then, his early work and Evo have influenced many other methods: XP, Scrum, and the UP all owe debts to Gilb's work. The popular book Rapid Development [McConnell96] which examines many key best practices in software development cites Gilb's work in 14 sections.