A recent survey

There is this other survey with interesting questions about challenges and strategies for successful agile methods adoption:
http://agileresearchnetwork.org/take-the-agile-in-non-agile-environment-survey/

It reminded me that I have seen, time and again, individuals and teams facing enormous struggles to understand themselves and then change values, principles and practices in their own culture in order to ship better software. In my little window of reality around, many cases look hopeless. But, sometimes, there are individuals eager to think and behave differently and who are actually looking for hints to learn new professional principles and values. For those cases, I usually give the following answers to questions like these:

Question 1: Have you encountered challenges to improve software engineering principles, values and practices?

Part of my answer: many challenges, but —this could surprise you— many come from IT people (architects and developers, and their managers) who are unwilling —or unable— to unlearn and relearn.

Question 2: Which strategies would you suggest to face the challenge of shameful levels of unprofessionalism in software development projects?

Part of my answer: We already know: there is no silver bullet. But, one sensible strategy is to start a long journey of un-learning and re-learning the own computer software career. Get back to human basics: un-learning and re-learning basic philosophical and critical thinking, deep study of philosophy of science and engineering, and other basic stuff in the Humanities; for instance, anthropological research as a preparation for doing cultural critical analysis.