To be truely Agile requires Systems Engineers – Tom Gilb

Tom Gilb is giving a keynote at Agile India Lite on 6 September. Claim your FREE ticket now

Transcript

Most everybody in the agile business is culturally programmers. Number one is we have to move to the systems level. We have to consider more than the code. We have to consider the data and the machine means and the people and the laws and the cultures and things like that.

We have to be what I call systems engineers. And there’s a very well known discipline which is used by people building military and space systems, at the very least. And we have to engineer our systems. We have to design our systems to have high security, high usability, low technical debt. These things have to be designed in by engineers and architects.

You can’t write them in by being a programmer. So in a sense, we have a hobby builder industry using hammering and sawing and nails, and yet they’re sort of trying to build a 300 storey skyscraper and they don’t realize that engineers have to do that. And the people who are really good at hammering and sawing should not have the major control and management of that. That’s ridiculous.