Corporate obsession with short-term profits has been a contributing force behind the adoption and advocacy of the Agile Software practices. As I’ve argued repeatedly, customer satisfaction and product success isn’t about process or delivering faster, it’s about creating a great user experience. Customer value is a result of building a great product; building a great product is the strategy; customer satisfication is the by-product. In fact, short incremental releases often result in less customer satisfaction, not more.

Work smarter, not harder is common wisdom for solving difficult problems. Analysis is the process of applying our knowledge intelligently to solve difficult problems. Upfront analysis saves time. It’s about working smarter, not harder.

Delivering software requires courage. In “Extreme Programming Explained”, Kent Beck explains, “Sometimes courage manifests as patience.” The practice of software development requires the leaders and the team to have faith in their development practices and the courage to stay with them when fear gives you doubts. Who said software development is easy?

 
I’m reminded of an interview I had with a young company for a Software Director role.  They were at point where they were ready to begin rapidly acquiring new customers.  When a new customer signed, …

The Agile software development practices are in their infancy stage as evidenced by the number of variants that are being promoted in popular print and usage today:  Scrum and XP being two popular variants.  Clearly …

Have you ever wondered why software process has yet to flourish in the software industry?  Why, after many decades of industry growth, there is no consensus on a process methodology or even best practices?  Why …