The Nature of Software Development

Preface

I’ve been doing software for over a half century. I’ve had some great successes and some truly colossal failures.

For all that time, I’ve been talking with people, coaching, and teaching about software development. And mostly, I’ve been thinking. I’ve been trying to figure out how this can all seem so simple and yet be so complex. If you’ve been involved in software development, you too have probably often felt that all this should be simple, but somehow it gets all complicated.

Thanks to being in the right place at the right time, I’ve been part of the Agile movement since the very beginning. That has drawn me back toward simplicity.

Like many of the best ideas in software development, modern “Agile” software development offers to ...