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Applications don't age like fine wine. The older an application is, the less likely it will work natively with newer hardware and software. In turn, this means you'll spend more time maintaining your legacy application and less time building newer and more valuable software. You'll also spend more money. Companies spend up to 80% of their IT budgets maintaining legacy applications.

The following article on experimentation is part 4 of an 8-part series on the Agile Mindset Principles. These are principles that help you obtain (and maintain) an agile mindset. Having an agile mindset is what makes everything else related to agile methodologies work. You can read part 1 here. 

This article on sustainability is another installment of the Agile Principles Series. You can read the first piece here.

Sustainability is something that is generally understood at one level or another in various industries and business departments. If you quiz anybody in the c-suite they would tell you that sustainability is important to their business functioning well; it’s a key component of the famous 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (known as “sharpening the saw”). The thinking is that as you work to find balance, you achieve sustainability.

Note, this is part 2 of an 8 part series of the agile principles series. You can find part one here.

One of the most important things you can do is foster an environment, culture, and habit of collaboration. This is a key feature of whatever agile framework you chose to employ at your work. All of the procedures, ceremonies, and processes are built around the idea of collaboration.

Have you ever been working on a development effort and felt like you were on an endless merry-go-round? Did you ever participate in meetings or procedures without knowing why you were there in the first place? Are things that your are doing, or that your team is doing, stale?

Your project, despite your best efforts, went completely off the rails.  Scope crept, deadlines were missed, budgets were busted, and fingers were pointed.  No amount of cajoling your developers made the situation any better, and the client, well, why couldn’t they just be reasonable?