Lessons Learned from a Scientific Software Development Project

In the mid-90s, I was working for a company transitioning to agile software development. We hadn't considered that our biggest problem in this change was that developers would be talking directly to customers. After some small disasters, we realized that somehow we needed to transfer the expertise and experience of our business and marketing teams to developers. When I first read the current Insights article, I immediately recognized many patterns in the list of lessons learned and that what these authors have to say is much broader than “scientific” software—it's about any kind of software, actually, any kind of development effort.