Agile Origins: How IT Escaped Waterfall

Before Agile, software projects were managed like construction projects. You defined everything upfront, handed it off to developers, and expected a finished product at the end. It sounded logical. It rarely worked.

This module tells the story of why the old approach failed and how a small group of practitioners wrote a manifesto that shifted the entire industry.

Lessons

1. The Dinosaur Age: What's Wrong with Waterfall? — Understand the structural problems that make Waterfall a poor fit for most software projects.
2. The Birth of Agile: The Manifesto and 4 Core Values — Learn what was decided in Snowbird, Utah in 2001 and why it still matters today.
3. Side by Side: Scrum vs Waterfall in Detail — Compare the two approaches head-to-head and understand when each one makes sense.