Being agile existed long before “Agile”

It’s true, it’s completely true.

My recent articles on The Agile Manifesto have resulted in some interesting side discussions. These are a few common reactions:

1. One, typically from older more experienced people is “Thank you for saying it! I thought I was going mad!”, or something like that. People who’ve been in technology of one sort or another for a long time have seen multiple trends come and go and try to think past the fad. A bit like me.
2. Another, from a subset of Agile devotees, is something along the lines of “You can’t SAY that! Agile is great. You clearly don’t understand ‘The Agile Mindset’”. Now to be fair, since no-one will tell me what “The Agile Mindset” is and no-one seems to have ever written it down, I’m at a disadvantage there.
3. A third is from people who have worked in software organizations where the culture from the mid-90s into the mid-noughties seems to have been grim, where there was no working knowledge of basic project management and where the software crisis of the ’60s never ended. For them, the Agile Manifesto and its gradual adoption caused a blessed relief from some pretty grim working practices.
4. The last is from people who have never known anything else. Often younger people and really good devs, they sometimes assume that anything pre-2010 only ever ran on mainframes powered by watermills. Then I…