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- July 11, 2018
- Rants
Have you ever stopped to consider how fortunate we are? We are part of a community of Agile practitioners and there are many benefits to being part of this community.
I am fortunate that I get to speak at many of the Agile conferences, including the big Agile Conference, the deliver:Agile Conference, Scrum Gatherings, Better Software Conference, and many others.
In my experience, these conferences are different than other industry conferences that I’ve attended. They’re different from product-oriented conferences like COMDEX or language and framework oriented conferences like JavaOne. We focus on improving and sharing techniques around software development and that’s really exciting because it means that we’re still learning and growing a great deal as we continue to discover better ways of building software.
The software development community is really unique and special. Most of us are “makers” which means that we are fed by creating things, making things. We like learning new things and creating new things. We have this element of constantly learning and constantly discovering new and better ways of building software. This attracts a certain kind of individual to the field.
We are a relatively small community, especially in proportion to the amount of influence that we have in the world. All businesses are driven by software and so discovering better ways of creating it and maintaining it is of paramount importance to our society and serves a critical role for business.
Another key characteristic that I find in the Agile community is kindness. People are excited to share what they’ve learned and there’s a real sense of progress on the industry level. There are a lot of people in the Agile community that I can reach out to when I have questions or want to share ideas.
The other Agile consultants that I know and I are constantly sharing ideas and new material with each other and this is really exciting. We are wise enough to know that we aren’t competition to each other and that our only real competition is ignorance. When we look at the tens of thousands of companies that could immediately benefit but are unaware of many of the things that would benefit them from the Agile movement then we see that our real competition is ignorance and it makes a lot of sense to help each other. Helping each other is Agile, after all.
So, my sense of the Agile community is that it’s sincere. We really want to help and we believe that we can. Looking at other communities I don’t always see that that’s possible. It’s hard to be a doctor or a lawyer these days and still really care. I admire them for having to work within so many constraints.
I think that software and the software development profession is one of the few professions that still values creativity and allows us to keep growing and expanding and learning. I’m excited and honored to be part of this community and to help software development become a true discipline and a valuable profession.
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