The forth principle of the Agile Manifesto tells us that we should value “Responding to change over following a plan”. This seems pretty strait forward, right? If a client wants a specific feature we implement it, if he wants something else, we do that too. It should be the perfect way to work. We are not subject to any plan, instead we just react to whatever changes the client wants.

Wrong!

The first thing one should understand is that changes don’t only affect the product. Change is all around us. We must see, understand, and embrace it. If you are a software developer you should write code differently today than you did a year ago or will do next year. If you are a project manager you should organize the components of your project differently today than you did in the past or you will do in the future. If you are constantly thinking of change, you can actually work in a way that you plan for change.

“Change is the only constant in life.”

― Heraclitus

To plan for something you need to have that thing constant, stable, foreseeable. As the quote says it, change is the only foreseeable constant in life, so planning for it is the logical step to take.

We at Syneto embrace change on various levels. As a company we know that we must continuously improve the way we present and sell our products. As a factory we now the products we sell today won’t be the same with the products we will sell someday in the future. As a team we plan for new members joining us and some departing. As a software team we know that the way we plan and execute our task must change and get better every day. As software developers we know we must write code that will be changed in the future, and plan to make that change as easy as possible.

Our way of evolving and changing became such a success story that you can find a paper written about it at the Agile Alliance website, entitled One Bug Per Month.