Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

Preface

This book contains two ideas. The first idea is practical and the second more philosophical, but both are essential if we realize the potential of information technology to transform business.

The first is about changing your development team. In the short to medium term, the focus is on making your team Agile. In the longer term, it's about making your team into a learning team, capable of learning, changing and improving itself. Such teams are true Agile teams.

Improving the software development process has always been difficult. In part, it's difficult because we haven't known how to do it, and in part it's difficult because any kind of change is hard. Today, we have good models of how to do software development. The Agile community has demonstrated techniques that work. These techniques and ideas are well documented. Consequently, the problem that we face today is less 'How shall we develop software?' and more 'How do we move from the way we do things today to a more Agile way?'

The second idea in this book is a call for us to change the dominant view of software development. Traditionally, software development has been considered an engineering discipline – something to be planned, scheduled and executed. The view presented here considers the process of developing software as an exercise in learning and knowledge creation.

Both ideas are based on a very simple theory: it isn't enough to learn facts alone. For learning to be meaningful, we must take action on what ...