From almost the dawn of the age of software more than 50 years ago, there has been a communication gap between business and IT. For almost as long we have sought solutions, but they always seem to elude us.  Meanwhile, the gap has grown into a chasm that now needs a fairly substantial bridge.

From the business you may hear that ”we have no confidence in IT’s ability to deliver useful solutions”, or “we have limited visibility of progress, risks and problems”, and “we don’t know how we should measure the value of our investments in IT.” Read More

The software development community has been talking about practices in an informal way for a very long time - more than 50 years. In the way the community talks, a “practice” is just something that people do, a habit they have that may be good, or perhaps not good. Talking about practices in this way makes for good conversation, but it is hard to figure out how to combine good practices into something meaningful.

I like to talk about practices in a more precise way, so I will refer to these as Practices (with a capital ‘P’). With a more precise definition we can do some interesting things: we can combine them (or compose them) in interesting ways, and we can separate them to allow us to replace a practice with a better one. Read More