Third Era—Eras of Computing

Let's help each other learn a better playbook.

Situated in the larger history of computing, we can see agile is the second of three eras of computing characterized by their feedback loops. The read-eval-print loop allowed LISP, APL and Unix programmers to learn from what happened on the computer to figure out what to ask next. Small teams in the iterative delivery loop in agile, and armed with repeatable tests, allowed us to steer our code in the direction of customer interests. But we've entered a third era of computing where learning from incidents is the characteristic feedback loop. Teams of teams are serving customers with whole data centers.

Next: Third Era—Operations