Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are Not the Point

Chapter 2. Technical Excellence

Snapshot

We invite you to take a walk through the history of software engineering, starting the year it was named—1968. We’re looking for concepts that turned out to be important, and ideas that ended up as passing fads. We learn that all of the critical technical practices that form the basis of agile software development had precursors in software engineering’s first five years. We discover that project management practices that have been touted throughout the years as the answer to “the software crisis” have by and large had disappointing results. We conclude that we should focus our search for enduring system development practices primarily through a technical frame of reference.

We explore four essential ...