![](https://www.agileana.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/accesibility-design-376x250.jpg)
Accessibility and Design Systems: A Perfect Convergence
Ben FreelandAccessibility (508), Agile Software development
We have been practicing agile since before agile became a thing. In fact, we named our company after agile by combining two of our fundamental principles and core philosophies: Lean + Agile = Agileana. Back in 1989, I (Blake Newman, co-founder of Agileana) parachuted into a $200 million dollar project for the Department of Defense. This Command and Control Information System was several years in the making before I joined the team. Over a period of four years, I witnessed a classic waterfall model implode. Each phase of the project, i.e., requirements development, requirements analysis, design, development, deployment took so long that by the time the project was not even halfway through development, it was canceled due to technological obsolescence. In short, it was overcome by events (OBE) and that major event was the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), which rendered the project technically obsolete. Because of this and many other project failures, the Spiral Model of Software Development began to emerge, which ultimately evolved into the concept of Agile Development. We have been practicing Agile since day one of our company.