28. Agile as Post-Modernism

This web page is associated with a book called called Reverse Engineering the Universe.

The book can be bought at: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Dr_Jerome_Heath_Reverse_Engineering_the_Universe?id=_OvqBQAAQBAJ

The book gives a more complete explanation of these issues and includes a number of related topic discussions. The combination develops the understanding of these concepts from a number of viewpoints.

Agile Software Development: the New Social Science

Abstract

I taught structured software development for 12 years. Then I took a job developing software. I was surprised that there was no structure. None of the things I taught (as they were in the textbook) were occurring. In spite of that, software was getting developed faster and developing it was actually fun.

When I went back to teaching I learned, by studying in more detail, that I had been in an agile software development shop. So I decided to make the advanced graduate course in software development (Advanced Systems Analysis) into a study of agile. There were no agile textbooks then; so I made the course based on a research project, and the students were to pick an agile methodology and find out how it worked and determine its advantages and disadvantages.

When I went back to developing again I was in an agile not a structured shop. By this time most small shops were some form of agile. Large shops took longer to make the change. But I was ready for agile and understood the process.

Agile software development is a social science not a hard science. But it also totally avoids structuralism in the process. Thus it fits in better with the social science of Ricoeur, Cressot, Pecheux, and Foucault.

Jerome Heath