Agile Hype?

"Be adaptable, collaborative, delivery driven, people oriented, customer focused, guided by a vision; develop in short iterations; manager is coach" and most other "agile" messages are hardly new. And iterative development had replaced the waterfall on major projects by the 1970s. So is this just hype recycling old ideas? Yes and no. Many so-called agile messages are repetition from trends of prior decades.

early iterative projects

But, viewing as a whole all the principles and practices of Scrum or XP (for example), these methods have a fresh flavor; they push the envelope of embracing changing requirements, communication, self-organizing teams, adaptive planning, and so forth.

adaptive planning

Plus, some practices such as test-driven development and continuous integration are relatively new.

test-driven

continuous integration

Agile Methods Did Not Invent Iterative Development

There is misinformation stating that what is revolutionary about XP and other agile methods is their abandonment of the waterfall model and invention of iterative and evolutionary development. Not true iterative and evolutionary methods that eschewed the waterfall and applied short iterations with adapting plans and specifications have been around since the 1960s.

early methods