**Originally published on [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com](http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com)**

And now, a story about physics. I’ll get to programming in a second though, I promise. In 1900 Lord Kelvin (of the Kelvin temperature scale among many other things) spoke at the meeting of Royal Institute in London. There was a consensus at the time that physicists had succeeded in discovering almost everything knowable about the universe. Kelvin was one of the believers in this idea and also one of the most powerful and influential men in science. His speech at the Institute was on 2 ‘dark clouds’ he saw on the horizon, 2 experimental results that didn’t fit in with what they knew at the time. Since they thought they knew almost everything, Kelvin was confident that these clouds would be found out and moved past sooner rather than later. What he couldn’t have known was that within the next decade, those 2 dark clouds would revolutionize not only physics but would literally lead to the invention of our modern world, including the computer you’re reading this article on.

Read on for how this story relates to Agile projects. Although if you’ve been on a sufficiently large project, you can probably see the connection between things on the horizon that seem small and end up having a huge influence on your project. In this part of My First Agile Project I’ll talk about a part of our project that seemed like a ‘dark cloud’ and ended up being a tornado tearing through our town.