Chapter 15

Conclusion

"We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it."

-Claude Shannon

This Claude Shannon quote is controversial and usually generates interesting conversations. The main observation is this: we don't really have full control of the future. That's actually a meaningful observation if we consider the latter portion of the quote about the future at a higher philosophical level (our inability to change the past being much less debatable).

What if we apply the latter portion of the quote to software development? Theoretically, in software development, we fully control the future, in that it's the way we are going to write the next piece of code. And the amount of control we have is proportional ...

Get Agile Technical Practices Distilled now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.