Change!
Last week I’ve attended to the Rails Summit, first rails conference to be realized in Latin America (btw, excellent event 
), and one thing that attracted my attention was what Chad Fowler mentioned in his presentation (sorry Chad, if the words aren’t exactly the same):
Real experience is equal to change. For most persons, 9 years of experience mean 9 years doing things the same way, but experience should only count if you are continually improving the way you work.
This got my attention since I frequently see people trying to use agile methods as pre-made recipes, which you can apply without thinking, as in “my team uses Scrum, or XP, or FDD, etc..”.
It won’t be the first time I say this to someone, but the Agile Manifesto states:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
So nobody should be afraid of changing the way he/she creates software, or adapting the agile practices to his/her context. The best way to develop software is the one that works for you. Change!
Cheers,
Francisco
Daniel Cukier on October 25th, 2008
Frank, change is one of the words I like most! I wrote a post some time ago talking about change and how some apparently not related disciplines are all related by the same concept of Change!
http://agileandart.blogspot.com/2008/05/vipassana-xp-e-mudanas-sem-medo.html