Innovation

What if Agile is obsolete?
What if the forcing function is specification driven AI development?

In October 1999 Kent Beck’s book Extreme Programming Explained is published; in February 2001 the agile manifesto was signed. Both were driven by the very real need to remove the latency between specification and working software.

Prior to this software was developed using a variety of Waterfall methods - in simple terms comprehensive written specifications were created for a complete system, these specifications were then turned over to developers who created code to make the specification working software. The problem was the latency between specification creation and working software. The end users were required to imagine what they’d like the software to do and how they wanted the software to do it (what we would now call UX). The developers would then program the system and the end users would validate that the system did what the specification called for. But… Systems became increasingly complex and development time increased with that complexity. The latency introduced by this created a fundamental problem - it took too long for end users to realize the specification wasn’t actually what they needed or, increasingly, that the specification was no longer relevant to the work being done by the time the software was ready for validation. The solution was to decompose the specification into small, rapidly implementable units to remove the lag, generate rapid feedback and iterate toward the right specification and software system at the same time.