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SKP's Agile and Scrum Basics: Part 01/02

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Time to Revisit the History and the Absolute Basics of Agile and Scrum – Brief History of the Software Development Process – Description of the Waterfall …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. I have about ~16y 04m of Software Development Experience (2021) and have been working on Agile Projects since about 2006. My First Formal Introduction to Agile was through a Training by Thoughtworkers (Thoughtworks is a Leading Agile Company). This was while I was a Senior Software Engineer at Huawei, Bangalore, India. I have worked on Agile/TDD/Pair Programming (Various Variants) in multiple companies including Huawei, Symantec, Yahoo, Finastra*, Oracle*, OpenText*. Recently and Once Again, I attended a Formal Classroom Training (Company Internal) on Agile. I jotted down the most important points and now am presenting them in this Blog. I hope it helps and becomes a Ready Reckoner for Understanding/Learning the Agile Basics (Needs, Motivations, Practice, and Story of Evolution).* [Original Product Firms were Acquired by these Current Companies] Formal Software Development, specifically for those who started in the field in the 1990s or even the 1980s was essentially a very Heavy Plan Driven Approach. The name given to it was Waterfall Software Development Process (As a Result of Being a Set of Successive Steps akin to a Waterfall). Even Academia captures it in textbooks with the name as the Waterfall Process. The proponent of this approach was an American Computer Scientist by the name of Winston Royce. In his 1970s paper, he first formally defined the Stage Wise Waterfall Process (Though he is not the one who named it ‘Waterfall’). The sequence wise phrases that were identified by him are as follows: [CREDITS BEGIN: WIKIPEDIA/OTHERS] Royce called them “Implementation Steps to Develop a Large Computer Program for Delivery to a Customer.” Royce actually foresaw a major shortcoming in this methodology, which he described as: The testing phase which occurs at the end of the development cycle is the first event for which timing, storage, input/output transfers, etc., are experienced as distinguished from analyzed. These phenomena are not precisely analyzable. They are not the solutions to the standard partial differential equations of mathematical physics for instance. Yet if these phenomena fail to satisfy the various external constraints, then invariably a major redesign is required.

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