The Link to Agile
To fully understand design patterns, it’s useful to trace how they evolved through the different domains of their existence and how each domain affected and was affected by design patterns. However, you’re not here for a history lesson. You’re a software developer who wants to know the relevant details with some fundamentals to back up the claims. This is why we will take a shortcut to the point where the most striking similarities between the two design patterns movements—in physical architecture and software development—seem to have materialised.
Agile, as it is understood these days, is a non-process where software is
developed and deployed according to the
At the same time as the design patterns movement in software, other changes
were brewing. The concepts at the core of Scrum can be traced back through
published works on the Portland Pattern Repository or found in
It’s not that the Agile principles came from design patterns, nor did design patterns come from Agile, but they both appear to stem from the mood of the times. Both emerged from similar feelings that there had to be a better way to develop software. A backlash formed from the notion that we could increase quality by moving decision-making closer to the place where the effect of those actions could be observed.
Christopher Alexander had shown the value of looking to the recipient and user of the product as a guiding force for decision-making; in some cases, even a worker on the building site would be deeply involved. Agile development is an attempt to bring the customer closer, even going as far as to suggest including them in live tests during development. Alexander’s work on the processes of using patterns to help guide production mirrored many aspects of the worker empowerment found in Episodes and Scrum.
The
The manifesto can be found at https://agilemanifesto.org/ and the principles can be found adjacent at https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html There are a lot of resources available describing Agile, with many mistaking Scrum or SAFe or some other methodology for Agile itself.
Kent Beck developed the approach during his time on the Chrysler
Comprehensive Compensation System project. Some accounts put the timeline
around 1996, but the book
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland introduced the main thrust of the methodology at an OOPSLA conference in 1995, but had been using it and refining it for many years before.
For example, the usage of the term scrum and some of its
constituent activities dates back to a 1986 article titled The New New
Product Development Game by the authors of the