What is wisdom? This is a definition from the Ethics Resource Center:

“The ability to make good judgments based on what you have learned from your experience.”

According to this definition, a wise man is someone with vast knowledge and experience, a person who can teach others.

However, the Jewish sages had a different view of wisdom, as expressed in the ancient book “Ethics of the Fathers” written almost 2000 years ago:

“Who is wise? One who learns from every man.”

Thus, to become wise, a person needs to have contact with many others, to be exposed to their opinions, and to learn from their knowledge and experience.

I believe that Agile software development, among its many advantages, creates many such opportunities for sharing knowledge and learning from others. Let’s consider a few examples of situations in which this may occur:

Code Reviews

Agile methodologies give emphasis to the importance of Code Reviews. This is a great chance for each developer to receive some feedback on the quality of the code he is writing. My experience is that Code Reviews have the potential to significantly and quickly improve the programming skills of the members of the team. They create opportunities to discuss design alternatives and analyze the implications of the adopted algorithms and data structures. Of course there is no contradiction between Code Reviews and traditional development methodologies, but in practice Agile teams dedicate more time to this activity.

Pair Programming

Pair Programming is one of the most fundamental concepts of Extreme Programming (XP). The idea is that programmers should not work alone, but in pairs. Then, at the exact moment one programmer is typing the code the other programmer is reviewing it. It is like an immediate code review, with the advantage that the developer always has someone to discuss his decisions at the moment he is writing his code. Of course this is considerably more expensive than traditional development, but experience has proved that Pair Programming has a great positive impact on the quality of code.

Stand-Up Meetings

During the daily Stand-Up meeting in Scrum, people can share what they are doing. The meeting itself is not the appropriate place to discuss technical issues, but it strengthens the connections among the team members, removing communication barriers and creating new opportunities for the exchange of knowledge and experience. After Stand-Up meetings each developer understands what the others are doing, so that he knows from whom he should ask for help on a particular issue.

Retrospective Meetings

At the end of each Sprint, the team organizes a meeting to evaluate its own performance. This is a great opportunity to discuss what was done right as well as what were the mistakes, thus learning from the shared experience. This kind of feedback mechanism is essential in a self-management approach such as Scrum. Its main goal is to constantly improve the process, but another consequence is that it forms more effective team members.

In summary, Agile methods introduce many new opportunities to learn from others by giving emphasis to team work. According to the ancient Jewish sages, this is the key to real wisdom.