Most enterprise software development has evolved to a place where releases are infrequent and occur long after features were first conceived. The day of release is a nail-biting affair for which we assemble swat teams and stand ready to scramble and fix the inevitable problems.

This has enormous impact on the businesses that we work for, making us vulnerable to nimble competitors. We are forced to predict (guess) what customers want rather than relying on real user feedback, we can't react to market changes or explore new business ideas quickly, and we end up not building the right thing for our users or at least investing too much money in something where a lighter solution would have sufficed.

It doesn't have to be this way.