C H A P T E R  10

Summary

Agile is a process. APEX is a tool. These two inanimate things are brought to life and blossom in the hands of skilled and motivated software developers.

Agile software development was conceived in the 1990s. It was born in 2001 when the Agile Manifesto and its 12 underlying principles were written and published. Agile’s phenomenal uptake at the time was due to the software industry’s hunger for a new approach to governing software development projects; the classical project management techniques that grew up in hard industries like construction did not work in the software industry. The failure of classical project management techniques in the software industry was due to the extremely fast pace of change in the software industry and the inherent malleability of software itself. Agile explicitly recognizes that hardware is hard and software is soft.