Principles of software development revisited

Summer… my traditional time for doing all that stuff that requires a chunk of time… erh… OK, “projects” – only they aren’t well planned and they only resemble projects in the rear-view mirror.

Why now? Why summer? – Because my clients are on holiday too so I’m quiet and not delivering much in the way of (agile) training or consulting. Because my family is away visiting more family. Thus I have a chunk of time.

This year’s projects include some programming – fixing up my own Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook scheduler “CloudPoster” and some work on my Mimas conference review system in preparation for Agile on the Beach 2018 speaker submissions.

But the big project is a website rebuild.

You may have noticed this blog has moved from Blogger to a new WordPress site, and attentive readers will have noticed that my other sites, allankelly.net and SoftwareStrategy.co.uk have also folded in here. This has involved a lot of content moving, which also means I’ve been seeing articles I’d forgotten about.

In particular there is a group of “The Nature of Agile” articles from 2013 which were once intended to go into a book. Looking at them now I think they still stand, mostly. In particular I’m impressed by my 2013 Principles of Software Development.

I’ll let you can read the whole article but here are the headlines:

Software Development Principles

Software Development exhibits Diseconomies of Scale
Quality is essential – quality makes all things possible
Software Development is not a production line

Agile Software Principles

Highly adaptable over highly adapted
Piecemeal Growth – Start small, get something that works, grow
Need to think
Need to unlearn
Feedback: getting and using
People closest to the work make decisions
Know your schedule, fit work to the schedule not schedule to work
Some Agile practices will fix you, others will help you see and help you fix yourself

The article then goes on to discuss The Iron Triangle and Conway’s Law.

I think that essay might be the first time I wrote about diseconomies of scale. Something else I learned when I moved all my content to this new site is that the Diseconomies of Scale blog entry is by far my most read blog entry ever.

I’m not sure if I’m surprised or shocked that now, four years later, these still look good to me. I really wouldn’t change them much. In fact these ideas are all part of my latest book Continuous Digital.

I’m even starting to wonder if I should role those Nature of Agile essays together in another book – but thats bad of me! Too many books….

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