Where did this Agile come from?

Agile?

What is the history of

So right from the first time in memorial, four,

five, six thousand years that we know about, people have

been getting work done.

And to get work done, they had practices.

had a whip.
worked.

It was a practice.

These fellows

Did it work?

They built the pyramids.

Yes, it

Did it last?

No.

will be a Moses who suddenly says, oh, let's go.

all left.

There

And they

In one shot, the whole lot got out of the office

and left.

It will happen, because people don't respond well to that.

So, then, of course, there was Henry Ford.

He changed the

world a bit, because he brought work to the people.

Previously, people used to go to the car and fit the car.

No, he said uh-uh.

Wait a minute.

screwdriver and the car will come.

You sit here with a

Next car.

So, it

became more productive so he got more work done.

And this went on through the early 1900s, and then there
was this building in 1931.
is?

So, do you know which one this

Yeah, the Empire State Building in New York.

So, it was built in 1931.

It had 102 floors.

And when

they built it, there was only elevator technology to go up

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20 floors.

Not more.

around the building.

Only 20.

And there was no space

There was only space for one day's

material.

So, how long do you think it took to build this building?

If you know, you shouldn't say.
okay.
there?

We're looking there, okay.

How long?

Twelve years,

How long?

Somewhere

Five years, maybe?

It took nine months.

even possible?

13 months, it was finished.

Yes, it is.

And how did he do it?

Is that
He came

and he bought the land and he said one thing.

I want the tallest building in the world, and I want to be

number one.

He pulled in the team, the builders, the

architects, the town planners, the logistics, the truck

people, the material suppliers.

He sat them in the room, he locked the door.

want to be the first.

The Chrysler building was coming up

next door, already half finished.

first.

He said I

He said, I want it

Now you go figure out how and he left it to them.

That was it.

And he walked out.

In two weeks, they had the architectural drawing for the

building.
done.

They started digging and nine months later,

So, people say oh, was that Agile?

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Of course it was

Agile.

And guess what they did?

these.

They did every single one of

They did not know what the lifts would do when they

were building and digging the foundation.

They iterated

through.

They made mistakes and some of them were expensive

mistakes, but they got there.

So, it's not very new.

Around 1956, Herbert Benington started writing the first

way to build software.

How do you build software?

Ah,

okay.

So Benington said, you've got to do this and then do this

and then do this.

He didn't call it waterfall, but he

talked about specification, design, build, test.

He wrote

a paper on it.

And in 1970, Dr. Winston Royce wrote the first sort of

formal paper that he published on how to do software, how
to build software.

And guess where he copied that from?

Most of it was copied from the engineering world.

And if you made a change in this phase because of the old

way computers were, it was very expensive to make the
change because you had to go back and change a lot.

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So, what did he say?

Aha.

When you write the

specifications, I want you to put your signature.

change my mind.
signature.

I won't

Then you do the design, ah, put your

Now you do the build, put your signature.

So, everybody was being forced to commit 100 percent.

imagine how difficult it is to change.
waterfall.

Now

So, that's

And then we went along the way and it didn't

work and people said, hm, this is too slow.

So, around the

eighties they started doing rapid application development,

taking the same bit...Dr. Vincent Royce two parts of the
paper.

The first part was this part.

The second part he

said you have to collaborate and you have to iterate.

But the U.S. military took it, the finance departments who
had the computers took it and said, oh, forget about that
soft stuff.

It's all rubbish.

You just do it and sign.

And they forgot about collaborating.

iterating.

They forgot about

They forgot about learning.

started copying it, actually.

doing things.

So, these people

They started looking and

XP, Crystal, Scrum, DSDM, 1995.

In 2000, all these people got together in Utah and said

we're all meaning the same things.
name.

And there are two names.

iterative, I believe.

Why don't we give it a

The first name was

And they chose the second name,

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which was Agile, which is not, let's say...it was a better

name.

It stood for speed and iterativeness and everything

else.

So, that's how Agile was born.

not.

You did it naturally.

anything, you did this.

Is it new?

Of course it's

Without me telling you

A lot of you may be saying, yeah,

sometimes I work like that.

I use this with my kids.

move things.

I have a little wall and they can

They can have things and you can go through.

We do it in schools, in hospitals, in different areas.

Now, from 2000 until 2015, Agile has gone through a massive
transformation.

So, they have absorbed and we have

absorbed all sorts of learning from lean, from design

thinking, from neuroscience.

We've pulled in all the practices.

So, what is the

condition for taking a practice and making it an Agile

practice?

What do you think is the criteria?

When you can

say that practice design thinking is using, oh, that's a

nice practice.

Let me borrow it.

If it meets the values and principles, you can use it for

Agile.

Doesn't it make sense?

So everything that you will

see, we've got 70 or 80 practices now that you can use for
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your work.

And you can invent your own.

that is the history of Agile.

[END OF SEGMENT]

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Shu-ha-re.

So