Beyond Legacy Code

Enter Agile

When the eminent statistician W. Edwards Deming went to Japan in 1950, as you can imagine, he found a nation in tatters. Barely five years past the end of World War II, Japan’s infrastructure was still largely in ruins. The rebuilding of Japan was an uphill struggle at best, an impossible dream at worst. But Deming, originally part of a team sent to help plan the 1951 Japanese Census, began to work with top engineers and managers not to simply rebuild the nation’s economy and industry to pre-war levels but to jumpstart it in ways that no one had yet imagined. As much as any single individual, W. Edwards Deming was responsible for Japan’s post-war “Economic Miracle.”

But it wasn’t a miracle.

The ideas that Deming brought with him ...