From First to Second Edition

In the introductory chapter of the first edition of this book, published in 2008, we asked questions such as what is agile software development? Why is an agile perspective at software engineering needed? What are the main characteristics of agile software development? What can be achieved by agile software development processes? Does agile software development form a pleasant and professional software development environment? Such questions are now irrelevant since during the past decade, agile software development has become a mainstream approach for managing software development processes. A new trend we witnessed recently is agility anywhere—in many organizations, agility is used today in many areas, not only in software development processes. This is the message of this Brief. We highlight the perspective that agility is not limited anymore to software projects, but rather, it is a lifestyle. Therefore, we decided to call the second edition of our book Agile Anywhere. In this chapter, we present our Human–Organizational–Technological (HOT) framework which we extensively used in our first edition and show how it also fits the Agile Anywhere point of view (Hazzan and Dubinsky 2010); specifically, by replacing Technological with Thematic, the HOT framework deals with all change scenes (software, human resources, research, education, climate, and more). We illustrate this idea using the theme of education and analyze the Finnish education system, known to be one of the best in the world, from the agile perspective.