The Agile Executive

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pjen/1070766105/

In her foreword to Gender Codes, Linda Shafer vividly describes the flow of programming work at NASA in 1965:

Following a design, we wrote – by hand – computer program instructions on large coding pads (80 columns per instruction, the same width as a Hollerith punched card). A Courier came by twice each day, picking up the coding pads and delivering yesterday’s instructions that had been magically translated into a different physical medium – card decks. Put some paper on a cart one day and presto, the next day, a stack of 7 and 3/8 inch by 3 and 1/4 inch, stiff paper sheets with holes punched in them were delivered. These cards constituted the program, which was sent to the machine room where operators fed the decks through the card reader.

Fast forward to 2010. If you have not yet moved to Continuous Deployment, metaphorically speaking you are still punching card. Not only are you falling behind on value delivery, you are missing up on the following great point made by colleague Josh Kerievsky:

What fascinates me most about #continuousdelivery is how it changes the way we design and collaborate on code.