Little clarification about the right to make mistakes

I learned with my previous article about the right to make mistakes, at least it’s a not a topic very interesting according a lot of folks who work on softwares. Maybe a good sign (or not). Anyway, I would like to add a little clarification about it.

If the right to make mistake helps us to learn, I think I forgot to tell one thing: we learn a lot with our success. So, to make mistakes is not mandatory. The right to make mistakes is a tool for an Agile team, but, the idea with my previous article was not to tell that it’s better to make mistakes than build the good thing at the first try. Sometimes it happens :-)

If Oscar Wilde said “Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.” I think we can be a good professional if our experience counts a lot of success and not a lot of failures. What do you think?

I wanted to make this clarification when I read one more time some pages of the Jason Fried book “Rework”. Finally he tells us, it’s bullshit to think that to be a good profressional we must have 3 failures. And I agree with him. And my simple point of view is: to make mistake is a right, not a duty.

It’s important to have a safe to fail environnement, but we can take the time to think and get information from others (including the experience from colleagues with the Oscar Wilde definition) to avoid some mistakes.

With this clarification and my previous article, you could have the answer to another question I hear sometimes “in Agile team, do we take the time to do design?”. But, discuss about design in an Agile team is another question we would discuss another day.