The Agile Executive

Colleague Clark Ching posted an interview with Curt Hibbs. The interview focuses on the recently published book The Art of  Lean Software Development: A Practical and Incremental Approach by Hibbs, Jewett and Sullivan. In the course of the interview, Curt shares the following episode:

I was having a discussion with a colleague about Lean software development. She knew next to nothing about it and was asking a lot of questions. Finally, she asked “If I could only do one thing, what should that be?”

The answer I gave was “Automated Testing”, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the motivations for asking such a question in the first place. I finally realized that she really didn’t want to spend a lot of time learning and understanding Lean software development, she just wanted to be told what to do.

Curt explores the episode in the context of skill acquisition and explains how it led to his co-authoring The Art of  Lean Software Development. From what I gather from the interview, the book has been conceived with a very crisp definition of the needs of a specific class of readers – the novice Agilist. To quote Curt:

This book is aimed squarely at the the novice and doesn’t require the reader to make a bunch of decisions for which they don’t yet have the experience to handle… I think that this target audience was not previously being served (or at least poorly served).

I like this ultra-sharp focus very much. I have not read the book yet, but I soon will.