1. Founding texts of agile methods

1.1 Why agile methods?

We may well wonder why a socio-cultural phenomenon such as agile methods and eXtreme Programming emerged in the 2000s. Let's take a look at the concomitance of several phenomena, without there being any causal link between them, but all of which are bringing added complexity to IT systems.

The size of applications has grown steadily over the last 20 years. The arrival of PCs on the market, at rock-bottom prices, has enabled computer technology to spread to all trades. The majority of computer users know nothing about the underlying technology, but to make this technology acceptable, it has been necessary to develop HMIs whose volume today amounts to hundreds of thousands of instructions. This HMI software, non-existent until the mid-1980s,...