Marcel Proust and Continuous-Integration

Introducing Marcel Proust

I have been reading Marcel Proust, “How Proust can change your life”, by Alain De Botton among other things. One of his ideas is very much along the ideas of Continuous engineering and extreme programming, which is to fail fast and move on. To fail is ok, its how you fail and move on that counts.

A friend in the pharmaceutical industry was telling me about some issues they were having producing medicines recently, I was telling them about transferable skills and some IT development processes like:

1. Agile development process
2. Continuous Integration and
3. Lean methodologies

These approaches made sense to him, some of the ideas were new and interesting. These are ideas that have been adopted for software development processes, of course they come from Production line engineers in Japan, but that’s another story.

Makes sense?

With Continious Integration, to move forward, you need to be making mistakes, failing correctly and learning from the mistakes.

Agile V the old way

As you can see, like most things, there needs to be a feedback loop. An ex soldier I know was telling me how in the Irish army, there is no feedback loop, information is a one way street, so my friend making life saving medicines wanted to know more about Agile and how it could move his project along.

One Proust quote in particular made a lot of sense

Interesting reading, I don’t think he would have known about Buddhism, but he was defiantly on to something, Marcels definition of enlightenment was…