Why are things as they are? How might things be different? Some years ago I started a personal inquiry guided by questions like these. Just recently I read the Agile Impressions text by Gerald M. Weinberg. I have read many of Weinberg’s books, and I have read that some Agile Manifesto’s authors have learned a lot from those books. That is why I am especially interested to read what Gerald M. Weinberg has to say about the Agile Manifesto’s mindset.
The section Agile and the Definition of Quality, as properly stated at the beginning, is adapted from section 1.1 A Tale of Software Quality, in Quality Software Management. Volume 1: Systems Thinking. I noticed that Weinberg equates the actions of a quality manager —as of 1991— with the actions of an Agile team —as of 2013—.
1991: «That’s why one of the most important actions of a quality manager is to bring such decisions into consciousness, if not always into public awareness.»
2013: «That’s why one of the most important actions of an Agile team is bringing such decisions into consciousness, if not always into public awareness.»
That is pretty much consistent, historically, with the quotation attributed to Weinberg in the article about the history of iterative and incremental development, by Craig Larman and Vic Basili: «...where the technique used was, as far as I can tell, indistinguishable from XP [eXtreme Programming].»
In other words, this is additional evidence for many possible conclusions; for example, that iterative and incremental development (IID) was not born with object-oriented methods in the 90’s, or that IID is not recent and comparatively unproven. Also, this is evidence of how true David Parnas statement is about where the next big thing in software engineering lies, in the horizon or in the past, in the history of our profession.
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