The Purpose of Perfection
They say that "perfect is the enemy of the good". It's possible that their translation from French lacks some of the nuance of the original quote, and takes some license to rationalize a work management ideology where people who make decisions are insulated from suffering the consequences of those decisions. The typical diminishing returns of a software effort are not seen as a consequence of a poor understanding of perfection. There's a science to perfection, and western industry was taken by surprise by its competitive advantage when Toyota demonstrated that perfection isn't just practical, but necessary. In 2000, Extreme Programming introduced Agile Software Development into the mainstream. It was a methodology that gave permission to software workers to make the maximal effort that software developers understood was necessary to emerge from the process superstition of commercial, commodity methodologies that had dominated the previous decade. Now, years later, even authors of the Agile Manifesto have renounced Agile as it slips blindly into the same traps that previous generations of methodologies have. This presentation presents the spirit of perfection that made Agile possible, practical, and initially successful. It reminds of the superstition that can displace project science when we're not careful, and highlights some of the aspects of next-generation software development methodology that is already on the horizon.