“Doc” and I submitted our proposal for an open space for Agile 2009, The mushy stuff of values & culture – an open space for workplace dilemmas.
Please check it out and respond with words of support.
Posted: March 5th, 2009 under software development.
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After eight years with the same company, I spent the last sixteen months with several.
For those of you interested in Agile software development in NY I can tell you first hand that there is work.
The best opportunities exist for people who can demonstrate they get it — not just the practices but the values behind the practice.
And the best way to find opportunities is to work alongside people who are good at what they do and earn their respect and trust.
Posted: February 1st, 2009 under software development.
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It’s my final day on the Big Island after HICCS-42.
Unfortunately, I was a ghost at the conference. I spent most of the week tightly tethered to my East Coast work day. Much sleep deprivation, anxiety and coffee consumption.
I did see the Agile/Lean presentations chaired by Jeff Sutherland and Gabrielle Benefield and participated in the Ethics sessions in which I presented my paper. These were the main reasons I took this very expensive non-vacation and so I’m grateful for how things worked out.
Sounds like there may be an Ethics minitrack again next year. Apparently, this is a relatively unique thing in IT conferences academic or professional and an indication of why HICSS is such an unusual event.
The conversation around my paper may have sparked research interest. My “ask” of the largely academic audience was:
We need all hands on deck. We need to learn from other, more established disciplines. We need better data gathered with greater rigor and without the coda of a sales pitch.
How can we build software with consideration for benefit and harm as well as business value in the interests of society and our users as well as our employers and stakeholders?
How do we evolve from head count to the engineers/craftspeople we need to become?
Posted: January 9th, 2009 under software development.
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A December episode of This American Life starts with an interview with Will Felps.
He placed college students on teams with an actor alternately playing a “jerk, slacker, and depressive”.
The “bad apple” not only wrecked the team’s performance, the other members began to think and act like him.
Here’s a Google book preview of Will Felps’ paper, How, When and Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups
Posted: January 4th, 2009 under software development.
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This week, I’m presenting a paper at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. My goal is to engage academic ethicists in a conversation about agile software development.
Given the year in employment I’ve had in the last year and what’s going on at my current employer this week, it is a gift that I was able to attend and I’m grateful for it.
Posted: January 4th, 2009 under scrum, software development.
Comments: 1
The New York Times describes what happened to United Airlines stock value on September 8th, How a Series of Mistakes Hurt Shares of United
Investors wiped out $1 billion of the market value of UAL, United’s parent, within minutes of an erroneous news flash on Bloomberg screens about a United bankruptcy. Google and the Tribune Company, the owner of The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, whose Web site was the source of the article that led to the headline, soon blamed each other for causing the fiasco.
A chain of mistakes and vulnerabilities led to United Airlines six year old bankruptcy being reported as fresh news. Investors reacted, destroying value to the point that trading of UA stock had to be stopped until the situation could be cleared up.
Two features on a Tribune run website started the chain. One allowed an old article to appear in the most viewed box. The implementation apparently doesn’t prevent obscure articles from filtering to the top in off hours.
The second displayed the old article on the Sun-Sentinel site with today’s date but no original publish date.
Google crawled the article. It’s age and lack of original publish date confused the automated news search into interpreting the article as current.
Then a private analyst published it without independent verification. Then Bloomberg included that analyst’s report in their feed.
This led to the panic selling. Trading was resumed and the stock recovered much of its value but don’t mistake that many people lost alot of money.
The Times focuses on the relationship between newspapers and search engines. You can also focus on the pressure of news agencies to keep up with “breaking news” on various platforms. You can focus on a loss of discipline among editors.
I’d like to highlight how two casually implemented features on a website indirectly led to serious harm. I can’t imagine a print editor allowing an old article to appear without an original publish date. So how was it acceptable to allow online content to appear that way?
Given the relevancy algorithms Google is known to use, how much was the behavior of Tribune’s “most viewed” area intended to create exactly the behavior that backfired in this case, i.e. to create referential links back to Tribune for old content.
There’s plenty of blame to go around but how much sits with those who defined, accepted and implemented this behavior?
Posted: September 20th, 2008 under software development.
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Steven Doc List and I held a 20 minute presentation and 60 minute open space on software ethics.
I think the format works. Software ethics is not rules or reason, it is navigating essential complexity in building software and in moral choice. Descriptions that “abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence” (Fred Brooks)
We embrace essential complexity using the values and practices of agile software development.
We can become better software developers using the same tools we use to build better software.
We can learn through practice to recognize and accept responsibility for the intended benefit and unintended harm we create.
We can retrospect on our actions and their consequences, engage in a conversation with our peers, learn from, challenge, and support each other.
Posted: August 16th, 2008 under software development.
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At Agile 2008, I attended Jeff Patton’s talk on embracing uncertainty and Alan Cooper’s keynote on interaction design.
I am convinced it is the role of product owner or customer that needs the most work in our evolving agile practices.
Sponsors express their desires as feature requests. But, as Alan Cooper argues, there is no linear progression from what people need, what they perceive they need, and how they express that in language.
At the same time, supporting departments, customers and management want a commitment to a scope and schedule. And in response, the team wants methodical decomposition to estimatable stories.
And so product owners dive into story writing, decomposing software into smaller bits in order to grasp the whole from the details. But the resulting release backlog looks only slightly more nimble software requirements specification and only slightly better at describing what customer’s really want.
What if regardless of our initial input from customers, product owners took Jeff Patton’s advice and focused our initial backlogs on specific, desired and attainable end user goals — not on interactions but why they are valuable to users? What if themes were something other than a less granular stories?
Could we retain this focus through release planning by sizing these themes not by committing to a single path and simple decomposition but by a more complex matrix of possible implementations, classifying how effectively those implementations might meet the end user goal?
Posted: August 10th, 2008 under scrum, software development.
Comments: none
Constraints
(July 2008) “There are some 146,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, down from a peak of 170,000 in 2007″ — Reuters
“Although no decision has been made, by the time President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, at least one and as many as 3 of the 15 combat brigades now in Iraq could be withdrawn or at least scheduled for withdrawal, the officials said. The most optimistic course of events would still leave 120,000 to 130,000 American troops in Iraq.” — NYT
(July 2007) “More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts… The numbers include at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreign contractors and about 118,000 Iraqis — all employed in Iraq by U.S. tax dollars.” — LA Times
Goal
“(O)n my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war… ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected.” — Barack Obama
Estimate
“Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month” — Barack Obama
Target
“…that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010″ — Barack Obama
A lot of attention has been placed on the target of sixteen months and whether Obama will stick to it. Obama has said, “I am going to do a thorough assessment when I’m there,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll have more information and continue to refine my policy.” This has been called a “flip flop” or “reversal”.
But this is a simplistic interpretation of both Obama’s position and the nature of a target. The target is informed by the estimate in an attempt to attain the goal. The target should change as new information provides better estimates and if the adjusted target better attains the goal.
It is not the target but the estimate and goal that need to be debated.
Who are the military experts? Does this estimate represent a consensus among these experts? What are the assumptions surrounding this estimate? Does a range of 1-2 brigades per month represent the full range of uncertainty? What are the set of risks that might scuttle this estimate?
What does safety mean in the context of a war? What does it mean to ensure our “interests” are “protected”? What kinds of events would threaten our interests and change the redeployment schedule?
As long as our public debate focuses on positional bargaining around targets we will continue to miss the point.
Posted: July 15th, 2008 under software development.
Comments: 1
The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, begins:
“Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”
The nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations concluded:
“(M)ost of the key judgments have since been debunked as inaccurate, false, or misleading. ”
“According to the Senate committee’s July 2004 report, analysts who wrote the NIE relied more on an assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) than on an objective evaluation of the information they were reviewing. This group-think dynamic, the report states, led analysts, intelligence collectors, and managers to ‘interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program’ and led them to ‘ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have an active and expanding program.’”
A vast majority of senators did not read the whole report but only the summary or how that summary was represented by the administration.
“It’s probably pretty hard to say with 100 percent certainty how many read it,” the senior staffer said. “You can say with 100 percent certainty that it’s less than 10.” — The Hill
The unlikely became possible, the possible became probable, the probable became fact and the “facts” rallied a country to war.
Posted: July 13th, 2008 under software development.
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Executive manager, software developer, father and husband trying to do more good than harm.
