Foreword

Most software discussions, books, and articles seem to assume that development work starts with an empty codebase. The Agile literature usually presumes that the detailed learning about what is needed to solve a problem for a stakeholder community can be discovered iteratively and incrementally. This might be a valid assumption if one is starting fresh, but I seldom encounter teams with the opportunity of starting from scratch; there are always constraints. Most investment in software today involves modifications or extensions to existing applications and environments. Thus, in addition to discovering and implementing solutions to our organizational problems/opportunities, we have the constraint of fitting into the environment created by earlier development teams. We need to discover and codify not just the applicable domain knowledge, policies, and organizational goals that drive our current development work, but also to understand how the changes we make affect the existing application environment.