Our aim is to “satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery.” Agile methods has a kinship with a DevOps culture that includes incremental development and continuous development – continuous delivery. The method replaced high risk “big bang” deployment.
Agile methods have a rich history, predating “the manifesto” of 2001. Fundamental elements of agile are evident in “Lean Manufacturing” dating back to 1450, becoming more noticeable by Ford Motor Company in the early 1900’s. It should come as no surprise that agile methods predates the software business.
Academia has missed the true history as many proprietary methods were shroud in secrecy in an effort to protect “competitive advantage”. As software made its mark in military efforts, secrecy hid advancements in incremental development and the advent of extreme programming – a standard method used within our Tomahawk team back in the 1980’s. None of these hero’s made it into computer science textbooks.
Even the inventor of unix and the C language in the 70’s, Dr Ritchie, was an advocate of “agile” methods and paired his proteges into Extreme Programming duos. TEM Software’s founder took the lessons learned under Dr Ritchie’s tutorledge and incorporated them into Martin Marietta’s Tomahawk team.
Yes, business-wise, we conformed to reporting through a waterfall structure, but the project was essentially agile. Rapid Application Development paralleled modern Continuous Development – Continuous Delivery. This is how a sophistocated autonomous vehicle was built on-time, within budget and delivered a 10 over 10 rating during Desert Storm under the command of General Schwartzkof.
We used the same methods for the Vertical Launch System that was the first Cost Plus Contract to win 100% of the government incentive for three consecutive years. Yes, TEM Software encouraged Agile methods at our customers Westinghouse, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon – including our end customer the USPTO.
When our founder was asked by USPTO management what our “agenda” was when beginning a 6 week contract – our founder said “To transform the manner in which software is developed and deployed.” That six week contract in 2003 continues uninterrupted to this day in the wake of numerous successful products benefiting the enterprise.
