Agile Rentschian Thinking

" ...Agile Software Development will be in the 2000's what Defined-Process Software Development was in the 1980's. Everyone will be in favor of it. Every manufacturer will promote his products as supporting it. Every manager will pay lip service to it. Every programmer will practice it (differently). And no one will know just what it is."

The scary part is that Rentsch's observations were valid also in the 1990's, so if history repeats itself, we are talking about an absorption rate of 20-30 years or so.

Inspired by the now famous quote:

" ...object oriented programming will be in the 1980's what structured programming was in the 1970's. Everyone will be in favor of it. Every manufacturer will promote his products as supporting it. Every manager will pay lip service to it. Every programmer will practice it (differently). And no one will know just what it is."

[Rentsch82] Nguyen, Van and Hailpern, Brent "A Generalized Object Model", ACM SIGPLAN NOTICES, v17, n9 Ed: G. Richard Wexelblat, September 1982

<http://www.research.ibm.com/people/b/bth/papers/sigplan86.html>

MikeBeedle