Agile software development was born ten years ago, with a gathering of industry luminaries in Snowbird, Utah. They were frustrated that so much ceremony and effort was going into so little success, in failed project after failed project, across the software industry.
They had each enjoyed amazing successes in their own right, and realised their approaches were more similar than different, so they met to agree on a common set of principles. Which we promptly abandoned. The problem is that Agile calls for us to embrace uncertainty, and we are desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty. So much so that we will replace it with anything, even things we know don’t work. We really do prefer the Devil we know.
Over the last year or so Dan has been studying and talking about patterns of effective software delivery. In this talk he explains why Embracing Uncertainty is the most fundamental effectiveness pattern of all, and offers advice to help make uncertainty less scary. He is pretty sure he won’t succeed.