Project management is a complex field. There are many software options, methodologies, roles for team members, and expectations that can vary not only within an organization or industry, but also across the entire field.
The project management community is very attentive to every process improvement claim. There is rarely agreement on anything, from determining which project management software is best for your business to focusing on extroversion versus introversion in project managers to which project management software works best for you.
However, one trend has been growing since 2015, and it’s Agile project management. This is great for software development! ).
It’s easy to lose sight on what agile software development is and how it works with all the emphasis on Scrum vs. Kanban or agile customization.

Let’s take a deeper dive into agile and how it can be used to propel your software development to the next level.
This guide covers all aspects of agile management. It includes the history, development cycle and significance of the process, as well as a discussion on its benefits and drawbacks. If you are interested in learning more about agile management, the table of contents below will allow you to jump to the history.
The Complete Agile Software Development Guide
Agile’s History
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers can trace basic agile project management methods back to 1957 in Los Angeles, when Bernie Dimsdale and John von Neumann, Herb Jacobs and Gerald Weinberg worked closely on software development for Motorola and IBM. Craig Larman quoted Weinberg in his article “Iterative & Incremental Developments.” “A Brief History”
“All of us thought that waterfalling a large project was stupid or ignorant, so far as I can recall. The waterfall description made us realize that we were doing something other than software development.
“Waterfalling,” also known as the waterfall model, was the most popular form of project management in that time. It is closely related to Gantt charts. It outlines the tasks that must be completed at which points in order for the project’s progress.
Software development was made extremely difficult by this method. Software developers needed a flexible project management system that allowed for errors, bugs, setbacks, and the independence associated with the software industry.
It wasn’t until 1970s that agile became more formalized. This was led by Tom Gilb and Dr. Ernest Edmonds at the New York Telephone Company’s Systems Development Center. These ideas were not well received. The Journal of Computer Aided Design rejected Dr. Edmonds’ idea. Edmonds received one comment from the journal: “If you don’t know what you’re going to do before starting, you shouldn’t start!” He then submitted his work to General Systems. They eventually accepted it.
Software developers were at the end of their ropes in the 1990s. This generation of programmers, largely from Generation X (born between 1961-1983), was known as “latchkey children” and carried their anti-establishment teenage years to the office. Craig Larman discovered that waterfalls were “heavily regulated and regimented” and micro-managed. This didn’t work for this group.
Many lightweight and flexible project management methods were developed in the 90s for software development. These included XP, Scrum and dynamic systems development method (DSDM), XP and Scrum. All of these systems were available before the Agile manifesto, but they are now part of the agile methodo.

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