Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Seibel: What was the relation between the design phase and the coding? You four got together and sorted out the interfaces between the parts. Did that all happen before your 17 programmers started writing code, or did the coding feed back into your design? Allen: It was pretty much happening as we went. Our constraints were set by the people we reported to. And the heads of the different pieces, like myself, reported to one person, George Grover, and he had worked out the bigger picture technically. And a lot of it was driven by the constraints of the customers. There was a lot of teamwork and a lot of flexibility at the time, in part, because we were kind of inventing as we went. But under a deadline. So there was not as much management hierarchy, but just being more part of the team.

IBM doing agile in the 50ies