Check that. It used to be bad for the CIO. Now, in today’s economic climate, it’s disastrous. Nike issues an earnings warning, and Knight shuffles his executive team. Sobey’s ditches a grocery application and its CIO, Bradley Jardine. The consultancy ousts most of its C-level crew.

Desperate to avoid the scapegoat’s horns, some technology executives are finally beginning to take up arms against this sea of failure, redefining how software is built. They call it Agile Development, a disciplined, minimalist approach that’s both elegant and arduous, and maybe IT’s best hope to avoid "Yet Another Trip to Hell."

We, the Programmers...

The nicest thing Fowler says about traditional software development is "It’s great except that it doesn’t work." His accent is British Midlands. His outfit is L.L. Bean. His home-brewed coffee is Starbucks, but "better than they make it at the store."

He spent several years programming at Coopers and Lybrand back when it was one of the Big Eight. Then he worked for eight years as an independent consultant for large software projects. "Programming, requirements analysis, I’ll even do project management if you force me to," says Fowler.

He is also one of the 17 founding fathers of The Agile Alliance, a group dedicated to revolutionizing software development. The group members met for the first time in February, in ski country on Utah’s Wasatch Range. They knew something was wrong with the way software was being built, and they wanted to do something about it.

Coming in, no one agreed on precisely what would work. Kent Beck, a project manager for hire, touted Extreme Programming, a system that breaks a project into tiny steps. (See "Variations on the Agile Theme".) You’re not allowed to go on to the next step until the first is proven to work. Jeff Sutherland, a methodologist and consultant, was wont to use a method he invented called Scrum, in which teams of programmers went over each other’s work every day. Jim Highsmith, yet another project management consultant, had published papers on Adaptive Software Development, which emphasized close collaboration between business and IT. And there were several other theories and methodologies.

Surprisingly, the 17 developers in fact were able to weave the common threads of their philosophies into the fabric of The Agile Alliance.

Agile means what it sounds like: fast and efficient. Small and nimble. Less money, fewer features, shorter projects. The Alliance framed a manifesto and posted it on its homepage (www.agilealliance.org).