Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

Chapter 11. Rehearsing Tomorrow

"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1890-1969, President of the United States

Most of the time, our actions are defined by what we have done before; change occurs when we put our new learning into effect and take different actions. This book has emphasized the need to move beyond simple learning and the necessity of coupling learning with action to create knowledge. This chapter looks at techniques for learning new actions.

On the whole, we develop software today in the same way that we developed it yesterday. So tomorrow is an extrapolation of today. If we are to improve anything, if we are to change and make tomorrow different, we have to stop extrapolating from today. We have to do things differently tomorrow.

This means that we have to know what to do – and then we must take action and change. Rather than operating on automatic pilot and repeating ourselves, we need to push beyond the comfort zone of things we have done before. We need to try new things, take risks and experiment. In doing so, we'll encounter new problems, things will take longer (at least at first) and sometimes we'll fail. These dangers, risks and fears represent inhibitors to change.

Many of our inhibitors are within ourselves – we place our own blocks, real or imagined, in the way. At other times, these blocks will come from the need to work in groups and the need for the whole group ...