Quotes from the first chapter of Alistair Cockburn’s Agile Software Development:

We are still in the infancy of naming what is really happening on software development projects. The answer is not process, modeling, or mathematics, although those play parts. The answer has much more to do with craft, community, pride, and learning […].

The next step is for methodologists to partner with ethnographers, sociologists, and anthropologists to see if they have words to capture other parts of the experience. Through such a partnership on one project, I learned that system architects act as storytellers. They keep alive the promise and vision of the future system, which is particularly valuable during the confusing early periods of a project.

This reminded me of the Wiki page Architect As Keeper Of The Flame. Cockburn continues:

In the book Sketches of Thought [Amazon.com], Vinod Goel (1995) investigates the idea that significant useful mental processing happens in a realm of imprecise thought, proto-thoughts of ideas whose boundaries have not yet been demarcated by the mind.

The study participants commented on the damage done to the developing ideas when the undemarcated thoughts are forced into a precise expression too early. Some processing works best while the proto-thoughts are still undemarcated.

It seems to be a very interesting book. Previously, I’ve blogged about an article that is an excerpt of the first chapter of this book, Games Programmers Play.