- We Fail Too Much
- Definitions of Success
- The Standish Group
- Doing the Wrong Things
- Doing the Things Wrong
- Time Goes By, Things Improve
- One Reason: The Civil Engineering Analogy
- Giving Up Hope
- Ignoring Your Mother
- Bridges Are Hard, Software Is Soft
- We Swim in an Ocean of Change
- Accept Change
- Embrace Change
- Capitalize on Change
- A Better Analogy: Evolving Systems
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
We Swim in an Ocean of Change
One crucial aspect of success for any endeavor is to understand and react to the environment around us. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. You can try to make iced tea, but you are always going to be struggling to make it taste right.
It may well be that a process like the waterfall was appropriate at some point in the history of computers. Those who worked in data processing, for example, did tend to follow a very similar process, with a reasonable degree of success.
But the pace of change, the nature of change, and the ubiquity of change has altered the forces driving our success. The pace of change in business is on the rise. The pace of change in technology is on the rise. People change jobs, teams, and organizations much more frequently than ever before. The Internet has driven commercial change to a much higher rate than ever before.
And there is more to come. Computers, technology, and therefore software are permeating every aspect of our lives, and as we move faster as a species as a result of technology, technology will have to move faster as well.