Agile has been the dominant development methodology in our industry for some time now. While some teams are just getting to grips with Agile, others extended it to the point that it’s no longer recognisable as Agile. In fact, many of the most progressive design and development teams are Agile only in name. What they are actually practicing is something new, different, and innately more interesting. Something I’ve been calling Post-Agile thinking. But what exactly is Post-Agile, and how did it come about?
The age of Waterfall
Agile emerged from the world of corporate IT. In this world it was common for teams of business analysts to spend months gathering requirements. These requirements would be thrown into the Prince2 project management system, from which a detailed specification — and Gantt chart — would eventually emerge. The development team would come up with a budget to deliver the required spec, and once they had been negotiated down by the client, work would start.
Systems analysis and technical architects would spend months modelling the data structure of the system. The more enlightened companies would hire Information Architects — and later UX Designers — to understand user needs and create hundreds of wireframes describing the user interface.
