Agile development, a story of computer scientists

The principles, methods and tools of so-called agile project management have garnered keen interest in companies and public organizations since the 2010s, and efforts to apply it have proliferated. However, little is known about the history of agile project management. Without claiming to reconstruct it exhaustively, this article places agility within a history of software development project management methodologies. Largely overlooked in the sociological literature on computing, these methodologies generate debates that are no less intense than others usually analysed in professional computing cultures. The agile mode thus provides an opportunity to take an original look at computer scientists.