As with many of you the transition from 2009 to 2010 has been a time for pondering not only the past year but the last decade. I realized that it has now been a decade since I began my journey with agile.
It was back in early 2000 that I first encountered Kent Beck’s book Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. A co-worker had a copy of this recently published book on his desk and I browsed through it and was intrigued enough to go get my own copy. What I took away from that book has since fueled experimentation and application of agile approaches in all my work (and even outside work).
At the beginning, few I talked to knew of Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, or any other agile methodology. By the end it was increasingly difficult to find companies that weren’t claiming to practice agile in some form.
Though many of these methodologies such as XP and Scrum were created or developed in the 1990’s, the first decade of the 21st century is when they became widely known and attempted. For me and probably many others this was “The Agile Decade.”
