Before Agile #
Managing the Development of Large Software Systems - Dr. Winston W Royce, August 1970
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/lectures/Lecture11/royce1970.pdf
Paper that is often cited as the origin of the waterfall model, while also being very critical of it.
Software Engineering - Barry Boehm, August 1976
https://web.archive.org/web/20190910093920/http://csse.usc.edu/TECHRPTS/1976/usccse76-500/usccse76-500.pdf
Article by Barry Boehm about the current state of the art and of future trends in software engineering. Section “II. Definitions” contains a diagram of the software life cycle that looks like waterfall. The diagram is very similar to Figure 3 in Royce’s 1970 paper, yet Boehm does not cite it.
Unifying Software Engineering and Systems Engineering - Barry Boehm, March 2000
https://web.archive.org/web/20170810170441/http://csse.usc.edu/TECHRPTS/2000/usccse2000-506/usccse2000-506.pdf
At the start of this article Barry Boehm mentions he “participated in a group at TRW that created a corporate software engineering
culture around the sequential requirements-driven waterfall model. […]
We did not realize how effective this culture change was until we tried to undo parts of it a few years later. By the early 1980s, we and other companies realized that the waterfall model was ineffective for developing user-interactive systems, […]”
The Leprechauns of Software Engineering - Laurent Bossavit, 2015
https://leanpub.com/leprechauns
Chapter 7: Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Waterfall? argues that Royce inventing waterfall is a myth.
Waterfall, Royce and Boehm - Laurent Bossavit, November 2017
https://twitter.com/Morendil/status/932865620613521408
In this Twitter thread Laurent Bossavit argues that we should read Boehm, not Royce, to understand waterfall.
Agile Converstations - Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick, 2020
https://agileconversations.com/agile-conversation-book/
Chapter 1: Escaping the Software Factory has a few pages on software development in the nineties.
Getting over the Waterfall, Deconstructing sequential development to better understand more continuous development - Kevlin Henney, August 2021
https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/getting-over-the-waterfall-c090c6228ca9
In this article Kevlin Henney examines the motivation and attraction of sequential development (the waterfall approach) to better understand more agile approaches to software development.
What is Agile? - James Shore, October 2021
https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/books/aoad2/what_is_agile
First chapter of the 2nd edition of James Shore’s “The Art of Agile Development”
BONUS: a circle-centric reading of software development through the 1990s, plus screech owls - Brian Marick, 21 July 2023
https://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev/episodes/bonus-a-circle-centric-reading-of-software-development-through-the-1990s-plus-screech-owls
https://mstdn.social/@marick/110703481860773401 (part of Brian Marick’s research for the podcast episode)
In this podcast episode Brian Marick does a great job describing the state of software development before agile and how the early Agilists started doing something different based on “change is opportunity” and “if it hurts, do it more often”.