Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

12.8. Conclusion

Hopefully, as this book draws to a close you have some idea of what to do next. Maybe you've even started to apply some of what you've read to yourself and your team. At this point, your learning from this book is finished and it's time for action and change.

The core idea contained in this book is very simple: learning is change; when we apply learning, we change; and when we change, we learn.^[] This happens for us as individuals, it happens to our team members as individuals and to teams as a collective, and it happens for our customers. Our products change our customers, who in turn learn and ask for more change.

^[] While I'm sure I read this theory explicitly in the work of someone else, I can't definitively trace the idea. Certainly, the idea that change is learning and learning is change is implicit in much of the literature cited throughout this book.

This book has tried to show how ideas that are usually applied to management can equally be applied to software development. The work of software developers and corporate managers has much in common: both work to give ideas physical presence, both seek to create structures for abstract concepts and in the process reduce costs to improve efficiency – whether measured in financial terms or through performance.

Agile software development seeks to deliver better software by more closely matching business requirements. As the software development process takes on the characteristics of business and management, it ...