Pioneers and town planners - software best practice is dead

Treating your mature enterprise product carelessly will get your business into deep trouble, but gold plating a new product, before you are sure that you are building the right thing, is extremely wasteful.

Although this might seem like common sense, most debates about software practices are still based on the assumption that there is one best practice for all contexts. It took us few failed software product start-ups and unstable mature products to learn this, and how to adjust our way of work, depending on the business context.

This idea has recently been expressed in various guises by a few prominent thinkers, like:
• Simon Wardley’s Value Chain Mapping
• Kent Beck’s 3X - Explore, Expand, Extract
• Jeff Patton’s Dual Track Development - Discover -> Develop

In this talk I will take you through new ideas on the topic and important differences in the 2 contexts, share stories of our own failures and successes, and give you some practical advice on adjusting your approach for the context.

This talk is for any software professional who cares about business value.

Link to presentation