Learning Software Organizations and Agile Software Development: Complementary or Contradictory Concepts?

Abstract

The LSO Workshop series has focused on technical, organizational, and social solutions to problems of learning from past experiences and codifying the resulting best practices so they can be systematically used in subsequent software development efforts. The theme of the Fourth Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO), held in Chicago, Illinois in August of 2002 was “Balancing Agile Processes and Long-Term Learning in Software Organizations”. In this workshop, we wanted to explore the issues involved in managing knowledge in dynamic domains requiring significant levels of improvisational change within each repetition of the process [1]. Thus, it seemed appropriate to collocate with the XP Agile Universe conference, which focuses on Agile development methods that require significant levels of flexibility in the development process.