Many organizations are reluctant to introduce new tools or technologies, or even to update existing ones. The reason is often framed in terms of risk management, but agile teams already have the tools to manage the risk of change: testing and experiments. These approaches together eliminate gaps in risk identification.

The new Advanced Plant Technologies program established by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will explore ways to use plants' natural responsiveness to their environment as a military sensor to detect and report on the presence of threats such as explosive devices or radioactivity.

When you replace or significantly modify components of a larger system, too frequently we focus on whether the code we are building functions correctly. This is important, but it’s also short-sighted. It’s easy to introduce errors because we are changing interactions. Coding bugs are only one quality problem.