Smart People, New Ideas, and our first taste of a growing community of other developers who have recognized a problem and are trying to find ways to address that. But is this the “silver bullet” we’re hoping for? Or are we better off looking for guiding lights?
In this chapter, we discovered…
Though there are significant challenges facing us, some smart people have brought forward new ideas to start moving the software industry in the right direction.
Agile methodologies offer an alternative to traditional Waterfall development for building software in iterations that help drop the cost of development.
Software developers need to learn to balance the objective craft of writing software with the subjective art that the unique demands of software development require.
Despite its fifteen years or so, Agile is still “crossing the chasm” from radical new innovation to the mainstream.
Software developers and managers need to demand technical excellence and create quality software on purpose.
Agile software development directly addresses the challenges of a process-heavy methodology, like Waterfall, by offering a lightweight process based on technical practices for creating maintainable code. But many Agile teams aren’t aware of these technical practices or misapply them and end up not getting the benefits they hoped for. We must understand the principles behind the practices in order to apply them properly.