I’ve already compared agile to Alcoholics Anonymous, so why not religion? Tom Grant draws an analogy between the timing of Luther’s demands that sparked the Protestant reformation and the timing of the rise of agile within software development:
Remember junior high school history class, when we heard that Luther’s protest conveniently occurred just when secular princes were looking for ways to gain independence from Rome? The Agile movement arrived when more was happening in the technology industry than just the disgust of developers with schedules in which no one believed, or projects that didn’t deliver what the customer wanted.
Tom’s blog post, and it got me thinking: if Luther had started the Reformation and agile, the Reformation might have looked quite different. Instead of nailing 95 theses to the door in Wittenberg, in his first iteration, Luther might have only demanded a handful of changes to the Catholic church.