AGILE IN ACTION

No Bull started with an invitation to write a 10-year anniversary piece on the Agile Manifesto for an InfoQ series by the recipients of the Agile Alliance Gordon Pask Award. It ended up being something bigger. In a way it’s my attempt to record my journey over twelve agile years. I wanted to share some of my experiences and, for what it’s worth, how this agile stuff connects in my head at the moment. It’s not meant to be a rallying call. My hope is simply to raise the awareness of where we are twelve years later; to cause people to stop, step back and take in the present - to celebrate what’s good, be clear about what’s bad and why, reflect on the journey so far and think about the future.

"Technical debt built up in the rush to get software out the door always comes back to bite you. There must be continuous investment to reduce unnecessary rework so that more of the available capacity can deliver value. Diligent attention to the health of the code keeps it habitable. In a way, the code is a place where developers ‘live’. Think of developers as users of the code. Like any other user, for example someone using their mobile phone, they want a good experience each and every time they use it. In that sense, habitable code is a well-kept home that makes it easy for developers to maintain design relevance and prevent obsolescence while increasing reuse and reducing risks along with medium to long-term costs. Long-term business agility begins with healthy software that is constantly deployable. But adapting quickly and cost-effectively in response to changing customer and business needs requires more than flexible software. Greater flexibility is needed in business thinking with reasoning that is open to challenge and new ideas. Business culture needs to embrace a willingness to explore and experiment without fear of failure."

Continuing my last post about the knowledge iceberg, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi tell a story of the Honda City in their book The Knowledge-Creating Company.

I'm enjoying reading again the view of knowledge described by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi in their book The Knowledge-Creating Company. They posit that Japanese companies recognize knowledge to be primarily tacit, something personal and deeply rooted in an individual's actions and experience, in their ideals, values and emotions. Whereas the view "deeply engrained in the traditions of western management" is one of explicit knowledge, formally expressed in words and numbers, and easily communicated as hard data, scientific formulae or codified procedures. To the Japanese, apparently that's just the tip of the iceberg.