I have to admit, it is pleasant to “relearn” something versus trying to learn it the first time. The images, explanations, and past learning pour back into my memory. The memories and experiences are almost always good, the times fun, and the excitement of figuring out something the first time is renewed.
With that I’ve dived back into my most recent study of business intelligence and various OLAP technologies from MDX to the storage mechanism full force. Lately I’ve reviewed again the storage mechanisms, working to figure out what is inside the “black box”, that makes the OLAP Cube. Much of it I’ve recollected over the last few weeks with ease, but the black box is a bit of a mystery.
What got me thinking about this wasn’t the action of relearning these last few weeks, but an article I read that has to do with this exact topic. The Secret Sauce of Highly Productive Software Development hits the nail on the head of what makes an Agile team truly effective and faster, sometimes exponentially faster than a traditional team of software developers. Learning is a key to making a team fast. The team must always learn, every day, every hour something different comes up and they must adapt. Everything from the new pattern to implement a needed feature to the simple “I gotta hit this button even though it is not in the documentation” knowledge.
After all that being said, if there was one feature of Agile Methodology that I have to pull out of the bag of tricks and say is important, it is learning and adapting to the tools and the project. This aspect of the methodology is more important than almost any other part, of course all the other parts are built around enabling the developers to learn, adapt, and have process that can handle and integrate the “learning” into the actual development process as much as possible.
All this thinking on the topic of Agile and the basic inferiority of previous methods lends more credence to why Agile itself is permeating almost every methodology these days. It is strange, almost like the other methodologies, are attempting to “learn” Agile. There are of course those people out there that are naysayers of Agile, and that is fine, they’ll probably be out of the software development sector of the industry within the next 1-5 years. If not they’ll be relegated to the “maintenance role” of 35 years and will hopefully be happy with their “white picket fence” dream home. I personally am ready for the challenge of staying well ahead of the curve, far away from the mediocrity of the average, and pushing the envelope as much as possible. Addictions aren’t generally a good thing, but I am addicted to solving this learning bottleneck within project efforts. Not only am I addicted, I’m intrinsically connected to the whole learning concept.
On that note, I’m back to the blogs, books, and personal efforts of the day.
