That word might not mean anything to you yet, but it will in a moment.
I work in an eXtreme Programing shop - and like every place that does XP, we tailor it to our needs. This paragraph caught my eye today on wikipedia, and I think it aptly describes how every programming shop needs to address problems.
A key principle of [XP] is its recognition that fundamentally empirical challenges cannot be addressed successfully in a traditional “process control” manner. As such, [XP] adopts an empirical approach - accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to respond in an agile manner to emerging challenges.
It’s about empowering the programmers to actually solve problems. You don’t have to understand the whole problem to start solving part of it. It’s to bad the phrase “just do it” is already coined. It would be a great description of XP.