It's all in the mindset

I don’t know if it has something to do with the Shu-Ha-Ri theory that Alistair Cockburn uses to describe the three level of experience in the agile practices (In the Shu phase you practice and learn, in the Ha phase you start applying variations to the lessons learnt, in the Ri phase you do the right thing by instinct, because you know that’s he right thing to do), but there’s something in common between the most successful approaches to software development I’ve seen. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with agility, many of these teams or individuals were indeed applying agile practices, but I’ve realized that they were doing something deeper, and agile practices was only part of it. On the other hands I’ve seen so many people completely screwing up software development, regardless of the process in place, blaming waterfall first, and then RUP, and Scrum later on.

Technical excellence does make a lot of difference, but still I’ve seen really skilled people doing awful things, despite their qualities. What does still make a lot of difference is in he approach to software development, is something that is a combination of a quest for continuous improvement (something that we could maybe call lean, but that’s to close to be another label) and of desire to experiment and challenge what we already know.

Learning is a non-linear process. It’s not piling up bricks of knowledge. It’s challenging what we already know against new experiences. It’s experimenting different ways to do things, and analyze the outcome. It’s something different from reading books or following advices, pretending to be right just because somebody else said that. It’s dare to be wrong. It’s trying to do something different from the last time we did the same thing, because doing the same thing twice in the same way won’t teach us anything.

Put this approach in a person, or in a team, and you probably won’t need so many books. Books can provide you inspiration, for “proven” solutions, but proving a solution, is ultimately the key of our job.