The Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship – Because Post-Its and Legos Don’t Create Better Software!
If one were to characterise the last 60 years of software development, it would probably look something like this: 1950s-1960s: People who can program are so rare that they blaze their own trails to make things happen. They create amazing things, given the state and cost of hardware in those times. 1970s-1990s: Software development matures and becomes commonplace. Many non-developers are absorbed into large development organisations as a way to help control costs. Because of so many controls, checkers, checkers of checkers, and so on, costs spiral out of control. A desire to make software more manageable leads to a call for software engineering. 2000s-present: The Agile movement responds to the dizzying controls that the quasi-command-and-control structure of development has become with a manifesto – a call to get back to basics. To look past the waste associated with bloated software development management, and work in collaborative concert between business and development. As more and more organisations attempted to “become Agile” through transformations, some funny things happened. People started to believe that all they had to do was fix the process and the software would magically improve itself. Late adopters “got passes” from later generation Agile coaches and found ways to keep doing old bad behaviours under new names, run a few fun-filled days of trainings, and declare that the problem was fixed. And so on. There has been scant peer reviewed data that shows that any of the process changes that Agile promised actually have had any lasting value on organisations whatsoever. However, led by these same Agile coaches, we continue to believe (at least, want to believe) that good is coming out of all the work put into the transformations. A new call to arms is upon us. We of the Agile Craftsmanship community say that the only verifiable improvements that came with the Agile revolution were in eXtreme Programming, and the passion surrounding an appreciation in making great things. In this session, Howard will open your eyes to a lifetime commitment – something akin to the pride that one experienced in the guild traditions of medieval Europe.
