Welcome to the Lounge

From the Introduction (my emphasis)

Software development is a process of discovery and exploration; therefore, to succeed at it, software engineers need to become experts at learning.

When we organize our thinking this way and start to make progress on the basis of many small, informal experiments, we begin to limit our risk of jumping to inappropriate conclusions and end up doing a better job.

Software engineering is the application of an empirical, scientific approach to finding efficient, economic solutions to practical problems in software.

This means that we must manage the complexity of the systems that we create in ways that maintain our ability to learn new things and adapt to them.

So, we must become experts at learning and experts at managing complexity.

There are five techniques that form the roots of this focus on learning. Specifically, to become experts at learning, we need the following:

* Iteration
* Feedback
* Incrementalism
* Experimentation
* Empiricism

This is an evolutionary approach to the creation of complex systems. Complex systems don’t spring fully formed from our imaginations. They are the product of many small steps, where we try out our ideas and react to success and failure along the way. These are the tools that allow us to accomplish that exploration and discovery.

To become experts at managing complexity, we need the following:

* Modularity
* Cohesion
* Separation of Concerns
* Abstraction
* Loose Coupling