The Agile Renaissance draws on the knowledge of prior software development eras. Many important lessons in software development were lost in the late 80's and early 90's. But by the close of the millennium then Agile Renaissance had begun with a new focus on iterative development, customer centric requirements and planning, and automated test.

Agile development got its name in January 2001, during a blizzard in Snowbird Utah. A group of influential software developers met to discuss improving the state of software development and comparing experiences and opinions about software development. The term Agile Development was coined and the Agile Manifesto was crafted, it says:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Those simple statements have triggered an avalanche of controversy, and misunderstanding covering the entire software development landscape. That avalanche also has triggered people throughout our practice to look at how they work and this has led to many improvements.

Proven techniques brought back into practice and new discoveries were the turning point to this age of software renaissance.

There are many flavors of Agile Development. Probably the two most popular and best known are Extreme Programming, and Scrum.  They are two of the leading drivers of the Agile Renaissance.