Coplien - Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.pdf

Preface
We are satisfied by doing real work. Software is like a plant that
grows: You can’t predict its exact shape, or how big it will grow;
you can control its growth only to a limited degree. There are no
rules for this kind of thing—it’s never been done before.
- Charlie Anderson, Architect, Borland Quattro Pro for Win-
dows.
You will find no books on the bookshelf here that tell you how to
start up a new discipline. Software has been seeking its own way as a
relatively young discipline for the past 40 years. Every new discipline
struggles to find practices suitable to its survival and growth. Some-
times this struggle is incremental. Sometimes disciplines undergo
more substantial shifts in process, structure and values that break
more with the past to explore new ground. What Charlie Anderson
said above about the Borland Quattro Pro for Windows effort in partic-
ular applies to the rhythms of software development in general. Get
ready for change, for it e tomorrow.
The most exciting advances in science go hand in hand with radical
social change. The move from classic physics to quantum physics pre-
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cipitated from a crisis in physics. We talk about the software crisis, yet
no individual crisis in software — let alone the Software Crisis, what-
ever that might be — has precipitated the same kinds of change that
we associate with great advances in science. Software development
has perhaps yet to face its first true crisis that leads to the first true
industry-wide systemic change.
But that doesn’t mean that software is static. We can identify dif-
ferent faces of change in software development over the past five
decades. Our interest in this book is what software development has
learned about itself from anizational and social perspective.
Software development is perhaps working in its fourth social style of
system development. Yet what is really interesting about these social
styles is their tie