The BetaCodex Network welcomes Sebastian Kubsch, CTO at Pradtke GmbH as first-time collaborator a research paper, and as co-creator of Time-Oriented Software Development (TOSD). The TOSD social technology is published under an open source license.
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Time: It is so ever-present in our lives we hardly notice it at all. Time is a powerful structure. But the concept of time has been grossly underappreciated and extremely underused in software development, and in organizations in general. Notions of iteration and time-boxing in Scrum or Agile did not nearly go far enough in making proper use of the power of time in software development. Today, in most teams and organizations, software development remains marred by myth, secrecy, hierarchy and obedience, often trapped in wasteful rituals, sloppy roles and bureaucratic processes.
Agile, sadly, hasn’t made too much of a difference on this front. Since 2001, when the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was crafted, key debates within the movement have revolved around misconceptions, by and large: planning or no planning, how to run retrospectives, the roles of Product Owners/Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches, how to plan, how to scale, how to write user stories, how to evaluate user stories, and the like. We believe that these discussions (and others) have been misguided from the beginning and thus were destined to amount to little, or nothing. As a result, the Agile movement’s traction and impetus for change has greatly suffered.
Today it is clear that Agile has produced little progress in how software development is organized. In this paper, we argue that consistent time-orientation is the best way to move beyond waterfall, “do-as-you-please”, and laissez-faire software development. In software development, collective discipline, focus and flow cannot be produced through scaling or steering, feeble roles or supposed values, but that they must be tackled through structures in time. Time is the ultimate structure – we just have to put time to good use if we want to propel software development forward.
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This research paper is also available in a high-quality print editions, from Red42.
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