Agile has, like all great industry buzzwords, become a great marketing tool for a lot of companies and products. When something takes off it will eventually be co-opted by snake oil salesmen who switch some ideas around and rebrand what they were doing before as being "Agile". But just as we shouldn't condemn a religion (which is very close to what some of these concepts become if you aren't careful) because of the actions of some of its practitioners, it pays to understand the fundamentals of what Agile is, why it has made such an impact, and whether or not it can be leveraged for our own needs.

Like all great concepts in our industry, Agile primarily builds on best practices that have been identified and adopted to varying degrees since computer programmers learned to stop thinking about programming as feeding instructions to a machine and started treating it as a method of modeling and executing abstractions of their own creation.

• Iterative Development

  Barry Boehm's "Spiral Model" gave us evolutionary or iterative development as an alternative to the "All at once" or "Waterfall" model.

• User Stories

  Kent Beck introduced us to User Stories as a method of tracking requirements as an alternative to heavy weight, highly detailed, and ultimately misguided requirements gathering that was incapable of dealing with the inevitability of changing requirements and unknown factors present in any project complex enough to be worth doing.

• Cross Functional Team Collaboration

  Jeff Sutherland and his SCRUM teams brought us short, frequent, focused cross-functional team meetings which encouraged and enabled collaboration and communications over detailed and hopelessly naive formal documentation and feedback loops that demanded more time than it takes to develop the feature being considered.

But Agile is not just a re-packaging or re-branding of best practices from the past. It has taken the core principles behind these practices and made some revolutionary observations that allows us to leverage the concepts in a manner quite unique!