Experience Counts for Less?

The Wall Street Journal article "Dangers of Clinging to Solutions of the Past" illustrates the value of challenging assumptions and the inspect-and-adapt cycle. Whilst the article boldly asserts that increased experience leads to increased project failures, this is attributed to an increased confidence on behalf of the project managers concerned.

I would like to add that it is of little use to know that a practice worked previously without knowing why it actually worked, and conversely one should also know why something did not work in a particular situation. By knowing the "why" one is able to apply the experience to the appropriate situation.

We can only discover the reasons by taking the time to ask ourselves what those reasons are. Scrum's retrospective meeting (a post-iteration review) generally poses 3 questions:

• What went well?
• What went wrong?
• What to do better, and how?

I would now say that the 3 questions should be posed as:

• What went well, and why?
• What went wrong, and why?
• What to do better, and how?