Comment by AlexandrB
8 hours ago
I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later. Iterative development goes back to at least the 80s and doesn't require "scrum masters", "sprints", or "t-shirt sizes".
I do think that they were right, though, to point out that the practices already existed and that they aren’t inherently at odds with, and ideally support, good UI design. And the linked article makes a good case that Win95’s UI design was done in an agile way.
That’s not the part I intended to criticize; it was the modern tendency to discard iterative design and instead just treat sprints a series of immutable milestones with fixed deadlines, except the scope is fixed in a just-in-time manner. But it’s on me for not stating that more clearly.
> I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later.
Agile manifesto coined a term for things that already existed. It didn’t create it from scratch, nor did it claim to. But W95 did employ methods we would call agile methods today.