Paths and Destinations

The destination is easy ”to become a better software developer. Or maybe not so easy since better requires more than the addition of yet another skill or technique to one s repertoire . Techniques, tools, skills, and facts are part of becoming better but are insufficient in themselves . Integration with existing skills, the transformation of facts into knowledge (even wisdom), and the ability to base one s future actions on principles and ideas instead of rote procedures are all essential to becoming better.

This book is intended to offer one path to becoming a better developer. Specifically, a better agile developer; and more specifically yet, a better extreme programmer. By better, I mean more like the acknowledged masters of agile development and extreme programming: Ward Cunningham, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Alistair Cockburn, Bob Martin, Ken Auer (Please fill in the rest of the top 20 to reflect your own heroes.)

These people are not masters merely because they practice certain techniques or exhibit certain skills. They embody, they live, they exude shared values and principles. They share similar experiences and have learned common lessons from those experiences. They share a worldview . Given a common anthropological definition of culture ” shared, socially learned knowledge and patterns of behavior ^[2] ”it is reasonable to assert that the agile and extreme programming masters constitute a culture ”a subculture, actually ”of software developers. If one aspires to be like them, one must become a member of that culture.

The process of learning a culture ”enculturation ”is partly explicit but mostly implicit. The explicit part can be put into books and taught in seminars or classrooms. Most of culture is acquired by a process of absorption ”by living and practicing the culture with those who already share it. No book, including this one, can replace the need to live a culture. But it is possible to use a book as a means of sensitizing, of preparing, a person for enculturation ”shortening the time required to understand and begin integrating lived experiences. That is the modest goal of this author for this book.

^[2] Peoples, James, and Garrick Bailey. Humanity: an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thompson Learning, 2000.