Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

in the Digital Age, you don’t write the same software thousands of times. Software is written once, rewritten a few times to improve it, and then runs thousands of times. Every software binary coming off the virtual assembly line is unique. People don’t know what they want and you don’t know how you’re going to write the software until you’ve written it. Only once it’s in the hands of people do they know what they don’t want and do you realize how you should have written the code. Rather than the domain of work being repetitive, knowable, and deterministic with known-unknowns (you know how to fix it if something goes wrong), unique product development is unknowable and emergent with unknown-unknowns instead. For something that has not been done before, you don’t know what you don’t know until you do something and get feedback.