[danielvf]

"We value reliable software", is nice, but everyone values that.

But if you said "We value reliable software over meeting deadlines", then you'd actually have said something.

The power of the Agile Manifesto was that it clearly identified tradeoffs they were willing to make.

[shoo]

> if you said "We value reliable software over meeting deadlines", then you'd actually have said something.

This reminds me of a Jamie Zawinski quote from the book "Coders at Work":

  > [...] Are you trying to write good software or are you
  > trying to be done by next week? You can't do both. One
  > of the jokes we made at Netscape a lot was, "We're
  > absolutely 100 percent committed to quality. We're going
  > to ship the highest-quality product we can on March 31st."

[kazinator]

They try to prioritize their principles, but they are vague. Let's see:

> Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer by building a non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive system

Okay, firstly, what is that? And secondly, does it serve the customer if those are not the customer's requirements?

What if I don't want a "self adaptive" system, whatever that is? It could be bad: self-adaptive software keeps some global state somewhere and doesn't quite ever do the same thing twice. If I require something that produces exactly the same output every time I feed it a given input, then I'm ill-served as a customer if I'm handed some self-adaptive contraption.

[edocecrous]

> what is that?

A collection of popular buzz-words in contemporary software engineering research.

> And secondly, does it serve the customer if those are not the customer's requirements?

These are never any customer's requirements. Not a sane customer, at least. Instead, they are (conjectured, probably correctly, to be) generalizations of sufficiently many customers' requirements.

But you're correct -- most customers don't want or need any of those things (except non-linearity. But every piece of software everywhere has this spades.)

[the_af]

I agree they seem like buzz-words, but not from software engineering research. They look entreprisey or startup friendly buzz-words to me.

[matt4077]

Or you could read the book. I haven't (summer reading list, again). But it's got a 20-page bibliography, and appendices with all sorts of greek letters that define, well, a lot. I think.

The Black Swan was also by Taleb and probably the most influential finance book of the last 20 years, plus a great read for anybody thinking in 'systems'. It'd give the idea the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes words have no meaning, sometimes it takes some work.

[edocecrous]

The parent didn't ask what antifragile means. The parent asked what non-linear, proactive, and self adaptive means, especially when taken as requirements for a software system.

Reading Taleb's book to answer that question is probably a lot like trying to extract evolved dogma out of a religious text because each of those words has taken on a life and meaning of their own in SE literature. You can probably eventually get close, but you're better off just reading a few SE papers on those topics and inferring the authors' intended meaning.

[kazinator]

A URL to a git repo showing the non-linear, self-adaptive piece of software would be more effective.