Agile as Trauma

During World War II, America had airbases on a number of Melanesian islands in the South Pacific. Planes would land regularly, dropping off cargo such as medicine, foodstuffs, tents, and weapons that the islanders had never seen before. Once the war ended, the planes stopped coming. The islanders responded by creating what anthropologists called a

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Most of the big last gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential? U

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This is a good place to introduce the idea of using an engineering model approach to software development as opposed to the contractor model. First consider the typical contractor model. Under this model, whether used by employees or actual contractors, developers must be given accurate tasks to work on, and they must not fail in even small ways. T

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Sometimes, I will use the word “nimble” in place of agile in order to sense check. For example, we want to be nimble (i.e., we want to learn fast, continuously improve, and pivot), rather than we want to do Agile (we’re doing standups, counting points, and doing mandated, top-down two-week sprints, but not necessarily improving and still working wi

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