Tuesday, November 6, 2007

History of Agility

Tonight at the Agile RTP meetup, Rick DeNatale gave us a nice walkthrough of the History of Agility, or more precisely, the pre-history of Agility as he put it.

One of the interesting points he made was that in the early days of programming, things were more Agile. For example, they had the "punch card rooms," where programmers would all be in the same room working on problems together. And after that they had Terminal rooms (which I experienced in college) - again collocated programmers.

It wasn't until someone (IBM?) commissioned a study where one of the conclusions was that the optimum setup for a programmer was in an office with a window, all by himself. Of course, for many programmers, this has turned into a small cubicle in the middle of a farm.

Rick had quite a bit of information, and that from someone who actually lived through much of this history. And hey, I won an IPod shuffle!

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