Historical Evolution of the Agile and Open Source Movements

Abstract

Agile Methods (AMs) are very recent but many of their basic principles are rather old, inherited from the lean production pioneered in the ‘60s at Toyota for the production of cars. Moreover, many practices on which AMs are based have a long tradition in software development. For instance, unit testing has been used since the ‘60s. However, one of the major achievements of AMs is the integration of all these well established principles and practices with some others more recent such as pair programming. The Open Source (OS) movement has a long tradition as well. However, it was born as a way of licensing software not as a development method. Moreover, people producing OS software use a wide range of different approaches to software development. Even if, it is not possible to define a single OS development method, there are some basic principles and approaches that have become common in several OS communities.