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Only the Adaptable Will Survive Change

By Andy Hunt

June 15, 2006 — (Page 1 of 4)
Programmers are a conflicted lot. On the one hand, we love change. We love shiny new toys: new technologies, new programming languages, new challenges.

When the original C++ hit the scene, we embraced it warmly because now we had C with classes! When Java began to supplant C++, we were thrilled at getting better object orientation and memory management. Ruby is currently gaining fast on Java, and in another 10 years even Ruby itself probably will be replaced with some sort of direct neural-input system or something equally unimaginable.

But on the other hand, even though we tend to greet these new developments full of hope and excitement, it seems we really hate change. We hate new and steep learning curves that are forced upon us, gratuitous vendor upgrades that aren’t backward compatible, and new languages with weird, unfamiliar syntax (and far too many angle brackets). We especially hate those pesky users who keep changing their minds about requirements once they start using the system.

Change ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Charles Darwin observed, “It is not the strongest of the species that will survive, or the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change.” That sentiment holds true in both the biology and business fields. We like to go around saying that “adapting to change” is what agile software development is all about. But what does that mean, exactly?

Some folks seem to take “agility” as a license to run around like headless chickens, in perpetual crisis mode. Others take adaptability as a commandment to hack mercilessly. And some take “agility” as permission to beat their teams senseless with aggressive, unrealistic schedules.

That’s not what we mean by agile.

In our latest book, “Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World,” I settled on the following pithy definition: Agile development uses feedback to make constant adjustments in a highly collaborative environment.

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Change Manager blends roles of DBAs, developers
Embarcadero's first post-acquisition version of CodeGear's Change Manager aims to combine the activities of developers and database administrators. It can hold numerous schemas in memory and examine the effects of changes on the whole database, among other abilities Read More...

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