Datasheet

Such people often view IT, and speciﬁcally development activities, as a foreign

land. Viewing IT as a learning activity, rather than an engineering or scientiﬁc

activity, can help explain much of what goes on in that land.

1.1.1 Learning for Agility

The book aims to help in three ways:

For teams that want to be Agile: Increasingly, we know what Agile software

development is. The problem facing those who aren’t Agile is not What is

Agile? or What do Agile teams do differently? The problem is rather

How do we change so that we’re Agile? This book presents learning as a

mechanism for creating change.

For teams that are Agile and want to improve further: For teams that have

achieved Agility, the challenge is slightly different. Such teams will

already be seeing the beneﬁts of the Agile approach. However, there’s

still a need to improve and become even better. The learning-based

approach can help here too.

By explaining the role of learning in software development: During the past

40 years, there have been many attempts to make software development ﬁt

within the engineering and process metaphors. Despite this, software

projects have continued to fail. In this book, I suggest that software

development is an exercise in learning and knowledge management.

Changing our perspective offers new insights and approaches. In particu-

lar, this perspective allows us to harness the tools and experience of the

organizational learning movement instead of the tools of engineering.

This book doesn’t attempt to be the last word on any of these subjects. I’ve tried

to point you to many sources for further investigation. Instead, this book aims,

ﬁrstly, to introduce each of these topics and, secondly, to weave them into a

coherent narrative to explain software development as a learning activity.

1.1.2 Learning Creates Competitive Advantage

Modern business is constantly searching for competitive advantage: the ability

to out-compete rivals, to sell more products, to sell more expensive products

and to increase production. Once upon a time, competitive advantage could be

gained by having better physical access than your competitors to some re-

source, land, labour or capital.

Today, ﬁrms seek competitive advantage through better access to knowledge

and by their ability to act on this knowledge. Knowledge is the result of

learning; therefore, as suggested in the opening quote, a ﬁrm’s ability to learn

may be its only competitive advantage.

Introduction 3