Learning is your bottleneck

"Our civilization runs on software." It is therefore a tremendous privilege as well as a deep responsibility to be a software developer
Bjarne Stroustrup

I just started reading about “Agile Adoption Patterns” book and I must say I am already impressed. It starts with “Learning is the bottleneck” chapter that example how that is main problem with any project and how agile helps mitigate that risk.

Why learning is important? Because we cannot know everything about a project even you are doing software development for 20 years and unknowns are risk in projects. No two projects are same. Even if you end up using same technology set, your teammates are different or maybe it is a new organization. So we have to learn things as we go (no assumptions doesn’t help) by iterations.

Why it’s a bottleneck? Software project failures have a lot in common with airplane crashes. Just as pilots never intend to crash, software developers don't aim to fail. It is amazing to look at history of software failures, here are some reasons why software project fails

• Unrealistic or unarticulated project goals
• Inaccurate estimates of needed resources
• Badly defined system requirements
• Poor reporting of the project's status
• Unmanaged risks
• Poor communication among customers, developers, and users
• Use of immature technology
• Inability to handle the project's complexity
• Sloppy development practices
• Poor project management
• Stakeholder politics
• Commercial pressures

And it is quite interesting how all these reasons are somehow tied to not having a negative feedback cycle so that teams can make smaller mistakes and learn from them.
Only if we could have opportunity to rectify our oversights sooner!

Yes we can, we need a software development process that allows to us learn from our mistakes. The iterative nature of an agile process helps us to make small mistakes and fail fast helps us to make necessary corrections. And if we don’t pay enough attention to them we might end up as another failed project in the list. But wait is it only process that could save us from the misery? No it is always “people over process”. If we are not paying attention to our mistakes no process can help. We need people who are adaptive and ready to learn, “we need Cathedral builders not stonecutters”