In the nineties the development of software used to follow a strict schedule, derived from a planning procedure known since the 17^th century to boatbuilders in Holland. The most classical example can be found in the staged planning of building a house.

With regards to developing software this approach that consisted in drafting subsequent plans with strict timelines (generally referred to as the ‘waterfall model’), did not lead to big successes. Admittedly, in the early days software was still fairly easy on a conceptual level to understand, develop and implement. However, due to the persistent augmentation of complexity and the constant improvement of hardware performance, all has evolved very rapidly. After a few years, it was known that once engineers would actually start to build the software according to the plans that had previously been drafted, the plans would already have been outdated. As a consequence, other solutions have been looked for to develop software on a large scale. Generally speaking these new techniques have been called ‘agile’. Within the group of agile software development techniques the following are mostly known to developers: scrum, DevOps, DSDM, XP, Crystal, Six Sigma, Kanban, Lean, Universal Procedure, Agile Modeling, …