Tech Life of Recht

As I wrote earlier, I spent the first three days of this week on a Kent Beck course Kent Beck hurried on to QCon London to give a keynote with more or less the same overall message as in the course: accountability and responsibility is just about everything. When you take responsibility, you earn trust, which again enabled you to have a better relationship with other people, including developers, customers, managers, and so on.
One interesting bit came up in regard to discipline. I’ve always said that XP and agile processes take discipline to implement and use. Kent Beck’s take on this was that it was just the opposite – not doing XP was hard for him. Instead, it’s more or less a question of habit, which is where the problem often lies: Changing part of yourself requires an investment, but it’s not completely clear when the investment will yield a profit. Ironically, this economical argument is also used to promote XP: push the cost into the future and pull the profit closer – for example by releasing often, not gold plating, and so on.
Adopting an agile process then becomes a question of how you change habits, and keep from falling back into the old ones. Leadership is one way, double- and triple-loop learning is another, and there are probably many more. Incidentally, this is exactly the subject I worked with at university together with Michael with just about the same results.